Towards the Great Peace

By Ralph Adams Cram

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Title: Towards the Great Peace

Author: Ralph Adams Cram

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Language: English


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TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE

BY

RALPH ADAMS CRAM, LITT.D., LL.D.



1922




INTRODUCTION


For the course of lectures I am privileged to deliver at this time, I
desire to take, in some sense as a text, a prayer that came to my
attention at the outset of my preparatory work. It is adapted from a
prayer by Bishop Hacket who flourished about the middle of the
seventeenth century, and is as follows:

    _Lord, lift us out of Private-mindedness and give us Public
    souls to work for Thy Kingdom by daily creating that Atmosphere
    of a happy temper and generous heart which alone can bring the
    Great Peace._

Each thought in this noble aspiration is curiously applicable to each
one of us in the times in which we fall: the supersession of narrow and
selfish and egotistical "private-mindedness" by a vital passion for the
winning of a Kingdom of righteousness consonant with the revealed will
of God; the lifting of souls from nervous introspection to a height
where they become indeed "public souls"; the accomplishing of the
Kingdom not by great engines of mechanical power but by the daily
offices of every individual; the substitution in place of current
hatred, fear and jealous covetousness, of the unhappy temper and
"generous heart" which are the only fruitful agencies of accomplishment.
Finally, the "Great Peace" as the supreme object of thought and act and
aspiration for us, and for all the world, at this time of crisis which
has culminated through the antithesis of great peace, which is great
war.

I have tried to keep this prayer of Bishop Hacket's before me during the
preparation of these lectures. I cannot claim that I have succeeded in
achieving a "happy temper" in all things, but I honestly claim that I
have striven earnestly for the "generous heart," even when forced, by
what seem to me the necessities of the case, to indulge in condemnation
or to bring forward subjects which can only be controversial. If the
"Great War," and the greater war which preceded, comprehended, and
followed it, were the result of many and varied errors, it matters
little whether these were the result of perversity, bad judgment or the
most generous impulses. As they resulted in the Great War, so they are a
detriment to the Great Peace that must follow, and therefore they must
be cast away. Consciousness of sin, repentance, and a will to do better,
must precede the act of amendment, and we must see where we have erred
if we are to forsake our ill ways and make an honest effort to strive
for something better.

For every failure I have made to achieve either a happy temper or a
generous heart, I hereby express my regret, and tender my apologies in
advance.



CONTENTS

LECTURE

          INTRODUCTION

    I.    A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

   II.    A WORKING PHILOSOPHY

  III.    THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

   IV.    THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM

    V.    THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

   VI.    THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART

  VII.    THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION

 VIII.    PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

          APPENDIX A

          APPENDIX B






TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE




I


A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

For two thousand years Christianity has been an operative force in the
world; for more than a century democracy has been the controlling
influence in the public affairs of Europe and the Americas; for two
generations education, free, general and comprehensive, has been the
rule in the West. Wealth incomparable, scientific achievements
unexampled in their number and magnitude, facile means of swift
intercommunication between peoples, have all worked together towards an
earthly realization of the early nineteenth-century dream of proximate
and unescapable millennium. With the opening of the second decade of the
twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in
an unquestioned evolutionary drama. Man was master of all things, and
the failures of the past were obliterated by the glory of the imminent
event.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein,
everything so carefully built up during the preceding four centuries was
tried as by fire, and each failed--save the indestructible qualities of
personal honour, courage and fortitude. Nothing corporate, whether
secular or ecclesiastical, endured the test, nothing of government or
administration, of science or industry, of philosophy or religion. The
victories were those of individual character, the things that stood the
test were not things but _men._

The "War to end war," the war "to make the world safe for democracy"
came to a formal ending, and for a few hours the world gazed spellbound
on golden hopes. Greater than the disillusionment of war was that of the
making of the peace. There had never been a war, not even the "Thirty
Years' War" in Germany, the "Hundred Years' War" in France or the wars
of Napoleon, that was fraught with more horror, devastation and
dishonour; there had never been a Peace, not even those of Berlin,
Vienna and Westphalia, more cynical or more deeply infected with the
poison of ultimate disaster. And here it was not things that failed, but
_men._

What of the world since the Peace of Versailles? Hatred, suspicion,
selfishness are the dominant notes. The nations of Europe are bankrupt
financially, and the governments of the world are bankrupt politically.
Society is dissolving into classes and factions, either at open war or
manoeuvering for position, awaiting the favourable moment. Law and order
are mocked at, philosophy and religion disregarded, and of all the
varied objects of human veneration so loudly acclaimed and loftily
exalted by the generation that preceded the war, not one remains to
command a wide allegiance. One might put it in a sentence and say that
everyone is dissatisfied with everything, and is showing his feelings
after varied but disquieting fashion. It is a condition of unstable
equilibrium constantly tending by its very nature to a point where
dissolution is apparently inevitable.

It is no part of my task to elaborate this thesis, and still less to
magnify its perils. Enough has been said and written on this subject
during the last two years; more than enough, perhaps, and in any case no
thinking person is unaware of the conditions that exist, whatever may be
his estimate of their significance, his interpenetration of their
tendency. I have set myself the task of trying to suggest some
constructive measures that we may employ in laying the foundations for
the immediate future; they may be wrong in whole or in part, but at
least my object and motive are not recrimination or invective, but
regeneration. Nevertheless, as a foundation the case must be stated, and
as a necessary preparation to any work that looks forward we must have
at least a working hypothesis as to how the conditions that need
redemption were brought about. I state the case thus, therefore: That
human society, even humanity itself, is now in a state of flux that at
any moment may change into a chaos comparable only with that which came
with the fall of classical civilization and from which five centuries
were necessary for the process of recovery. Christianity, democracy,
science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand
years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history. How
has this been possible, what has been the sequence of events that has
brought us to this pass?

It is of course the result of the interaction of certain physical,
material facts and certain spiritual forces. Out of these spiritual
energies come events, phenomena that manifest themselves in political,
social, ecclesiastical transactions and institutions; in wars,
migrations and the reshaping of states; in codes of law, the
organization of society, the development of art, literature and science.
In their turn all these concrete products work on the minds and souls of
men, modifying old spiritual impulses either by exaltation or
degradation, bringing new ones into play; and again these react on the
material fabric of human life, causing new combinations, unloosing new
forces, that in their turn play their part in the eternal process of
building, unbuilding and rebuilding our unstable and fluctuant world.

Underlying all the varied material forms of ancient society, as this
developed around the shores of the Mediterranean, was the great fact of
slavery: Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all were
small, sometimes very small, minorities of highly developed, highly
privileged individuals existing on a great sub-stratum of slaves. All
the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science,
letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and
civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society,
was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. But
freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when
the body is in bondage. The slaves of antiquity were free neither in
body nor in soul, but with the coming of Christianity all this was
changed, for it is one of the great glories of the Christian religion
that it gave freedom to the soul even before the Church could give
freedom to the body of the slave. After the fall of the Roman Empire,
and with the infiltration of the free races of the North, slavery
gradually disappeared, and between the years 1000 and 1500 a very real
liberty existed as the product of Christianity and under its protection.
Society was hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the
guildsman, the burgher, the knighthood, the nobles, to the King, and so
to the Emperor, there was a regular succession of graduations, but the
lines of demarcation were fluid and easily passed, and as through the
Church, the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son
of a peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war
and the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble
beginning travel far. An epoch of real liberty, of body, soul and mind,
and the more real in that limits, differences and degrees were
recognized, accepted and enforced.

This condition existed roughly for five centuries in its swift rise, its
long dominion and its slow decline, that is to say, from 1000 A.D. to
1500 A.D. There was still the traditional aristocracy, now feudal rather
than patriarchal or military; there was still a servile class, now
reduced to a small minority. In between was the great body of men of a
degree of character, ability and intelligence, and with a recognized
status, the like of which had never been seen before. It was not a
bourgeoisie, for it was made up of producers,--agricultural, artisan,
craft, art, mechanic; a great free society, the proudest product of
Christian civilization.

With the sixteenth century began a process of change that was to
overturn all this and bring in something radically different. The
Renaissance and the Reformation worked in a sense together to build up
their own expressive form of society, and when this process had been
completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in the
quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the
rest of society; a servile class, the proletariat, enormously increased
in proportion to the other social components; and two new classes, one
the bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either
on trade, usury or management, and the pauper, a phase of life hitherto
little known under the Christian regime. The great body of free citizens
that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch, the
small land-holders, citizens, craftsmen and artists of fifty different
sorts, has begun rapidly to dissolve, has almost vanished by the middle
of the seventeenth century, and in another hundred years has practically
disappeared.

What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of western
Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and the monks
had made Mediaevalism? Some had degenerated into bourgeois traders,
managers and financeers, but the great majority had been crushed down
and down in the mass of submerged proletariat, losing liberty,
degenerating in character, becoming more and more servile in status and
wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate, dully ebullient
mass, cut off from society, cut off almost from life itself.

I must insist on these three factors in the development of society and
its present catastrophe: the great, predominant, central body of free
men during the Middle Ages, their supersession during the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a non-producing bourgeoisie, and
the creation during the same period of a submerged proletariat. They are
factors of great significance and potential force.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial
revolution began. Within the space of an hundred years came all the
revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and
electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the
world. During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and
economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny,
had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had
wrecked the moral stamina, "freedom of conscience" had obliterated the
guiding and restraining power of the old religion. The field was clear
for a new dispensation.

What happened was interesting and significant. Coal and iron, and their
derivatives--steam and machinery--rapidly revealed their possibilities.
To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be
available in large quantities and freely subject to exploitation; that
unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should be
discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously
greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that
directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.
The conditions of the time made all these possible. The land-holding
peasantry of England--and it is here that the revolution was
accomplished--had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry
VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing
industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer
gave employment to the mass of field labourers. The first blast of
factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers,
smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great mass of men, women, and
children without defense, void of all rights, and given the alternative
of submission to the dominance of the exploiters, or starvation.

Without capital the new industry could neither begin nor continue. The
exploits of the "joint-stock companies" invented and perfected in the
eighteenth century, showed how this capital could easily be obtained,
while the paralyzing and dismemberment of the Church during the
Reformation had resulted in the abrogation of the old ecclesiastical
inhibition against usury. The necessary capital was forthcoming, and the
foundations were laid for the great system of finance which was one of
the triumphant achievements of the last century.

The question of markets was more difficult. It was clear that, through
machinery, the exploitation of labour, and the manipulations of finance,
the product would be enormously greater than the local or national
demand. Until they themselves developed their own industrial system, the
other nations of Europe were available, but as this process proceeded
other markets had to be found; the result was achieved through
advertising, i.e., the stimulating in the minds of the general public of
a covetousness for something they had not known of and did not need, and
the exploiting of barbarous or undeveloped races in Asia, Africa,
Oceanica. This last task was easily achieved through "peaceful
penetration" and the preëmpting of "spheres of influence." In the end
(i.e., A.D. 1914), the whole world had so been divided, the stimulated
markets showed signs of repletion, and since exaggerated profits meant
increasing capital demanding investment, and the improvement in
"labour-saving" devices continued unchecked, the contest for others'
markets became acute, and world-politic was concentrated on the vital
problem of markets, lines of communication, and tariffs.

As for the finding or development of competent organizers and directors,
the history of the world since the end of medievalism had curiously
provided for this after a fashion that seemed almost miraculous. The
type required was different from anything that had been developed
before. Whenever the qualitative standard had been operative, it was
necessary that the leaders in any form of creative action should be men
of highly developed intellect, fine sensibility, wide and penetrating
vision, nobility of instinct, passion for righteousness, and a
consciousness of the eternal force of charity, honour, and service.
During the imperial or decadent stages, courage, dynamic force, the
passion for adventure, unscrupulousness in the matter of method, took
the place of the qualities that marked the earlier periods. In the first
instance the result was the great law-givers, philosophers, prophets,
religious leaders, and artists of every sort; in the second, the great
conquerors. Something quite different was now demanded--men who
possessed some of the qualities needed for the development of
imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of
those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new
industrial-financial-commercial régime, the leaders must be shrewd,
ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and
avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and
vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the
Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle
Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. The pursuit of perfection
always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort
as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art. This
aristocracy was an accepted and indispensable part of society, and it
was always more or less the same in principle, and always the centre and
source of leadership, without which society cannot endure. It is true
that at the hands of Christianity it acquired a new quality, that of
service as contingent on privilege--one might almost say of privilege as
contingent on service--and the ideals of honour, chivalry, compassion
were established as its object and method of operation even though these
were not always achieved, but the result was not a new creation; it was
an institution as old as society, regenerated and transformed and
playing a greater and a nobler part than ever before.

Between the years 1455 and 1795 this old aristocracy was largely
exterminated. The Wars of the Roses, the massacres of the Reformation,
and the Civil Wars in England; the Thirty Years' War in Germany; the
Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, and the Revolution in France
had decimated the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of
culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding--the natural and
actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly enough as
the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and
Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure. France
suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the end of the Thirty
Years' War the older feudal nobility had largely disappeared, while the
class of "gentlemen" had been almost exterminated. In France, until the
fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany and Great Britain up to the present
moment, the recruiting of the formal aristocracy has gone on steadily,
but on a different basis and from a different class from anything known
before. Demonstrated personal ability to gain and maintain leadership;
distinguished service to the nation in war or statecraft; courage,
honour, fealty--these, in general, had been the ground for admission to
the ranks of the aristocracy. In general, also, advancement to the ranks
of the higher nobility was from the class of "gentlemen," though the
Church, the universities, and chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages,
wide opportunity for personal merit to achieve the highest honours.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that
from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force
in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the
upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil
slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men
(peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes")
was increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy,
further weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling shell
burst to the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of
servility, no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the
gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an
age-long rage against the age-long dominating class, together with the
instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.

As a class, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman
Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was
during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland. Under
mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the peasant
was a happier one than he had known before. He had achieved definite
status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very thin
and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land tenure,
the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood and
monasticism. The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this, however;
absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the abolition of the
guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the dominance of the
Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the position he had held
under the Roman Empire, and from which Christianity had lifted him. By
1790 he had been for nearly three centuries under a progressive
oppression that had undone nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle
Ages and made the peasant class practically outlaw, while breaking down
its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and
building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood
visible as law and order in the persons of the ruling class.

Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving
aristocracy, came this irruption from below. In their own persons
certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were
imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the
finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce
that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force
of modernism. Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold
of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities,
and by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the
world.

Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in
government. The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which lay
the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine, could
give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was such a
thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to the
absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which was
fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the ally of
the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as the
misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this
new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth
century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast
perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a
splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed
in the personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of
the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.

The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes with
it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically
different in their antecedents, their protagonists, their modes of
operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the
creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of
the old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same _milieu_ that was
responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain
of the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and
finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at
the expense of the great mass of their blood-brothers, others of the
same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting in
new schemes, of government, which would take all power away from the
class that had hitherto exercised it and fix it firmly in the hands of
the emancipated proletariat. This new model was called then, and is
called now, democracy. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish between
democracy of theory and democracy of method. Perhaps I should have used
a more lucid nomenclature if I had simply distinguished between
republicanism and democracy, for this is what it amounts to. The former
is as old as man, and is part of the "passion for perfection" that
characterizes all crescent society, and is indeed the chief difference
between brute and human nature; it means the guaranteeing of justice,
and may be described as consisting of abolition of privilege, equality
of opportunity, and utilization of ability. Democracy of method consists
in a variable and uncertain sequence of devices which are supposed to
achieve the democracy of ideal, but as a matter of fact have thus far
usually worked in the opposite direction. The activity of this movement
synchronizes with the pressing upward of the "the masses" through the
dissolving crust of "the classes," and represents their contribution to
the science of political philosophy, as the contribution of the latter
is current "political economy."

It will be perceived that the reaction of the new social force in the
case of industrial organization is fundamentally opposed to that which
occurred in the political sphere. The one is working steadily towards an
autocratic imperialism and the "servile state," the other towards the
fluctuating, incoherent control of the making and administering of laws
by the untrained, the uncultivated, and the generally unfit, the issue
of which is anarchy. The industrial-commercial-financial oligarchy that
dominated society for the century preceding the Great War is the result
of the first; Russia, today, is an exemplar of the second. The working
out of these two great devices of the new force released by the
destructive processes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, simultaneously though in apparent opposition, explains why,
when the war broke out, imperialism and democracy synchronized so
exactly: on the one hand, imperial states, industry, commerce, and
finance; on the other, a swiftly accelerating democratic system that was
at the same time the effective means whereby the dominant imperialism
worked, and the omnipresent and increasing threat to its further
continuance.

A full century elapsed before victory became secure, or even proximate.
Republicanism rapidly extended itself to all the governments of western
Europe, but it could not maintain itself in its primal integrity. Sooner
here, later there, it surrendered to the financial, industrial,
commercial forces that were taking over the control and direction of
society, becoming partners with them and following their aims, conniving
at their schemes, and sharing in their ever-increasing profits. By the
end of the first decade of the twentieth century these supposedly "free"
governments had become as identified with "special privilege," and as
widely severed from the people as a whole, as the autocratic governments
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they failed
consistently to match them in effectiveness, energy and efficiency of
operation.

For this latter condition democracy was measurably responsible. For
fifty years it had been slowly filtering into the moribund republican
system until at last, during the same first decade of the present
century, it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it,
whatever its outward form, whether constitutional monarchy, or republic,
essentially democratic. So government became shifty, opportunist,
incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist, beyond a certain
point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not
alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the very
government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and organized and
administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very fabric of
society itself.

Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social force
were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical
justification just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a
certain amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to
regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were
joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the last
century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something
else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by
evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it
appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the
final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law;
through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life,
the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the
anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had
devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things
were eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very
highly developed animals to experience and environment, it had given
weighty support to the increasingly popular movement towards democracy
both in theory and in act.

Its greatest contribution, however, was its argument that, since the
invariable law of life was one of progressive evolution, therefore the
acquired characteristics which formed the material of evolution, and
were heritable, could be mechanically increased in number by education;
hence the body of inheritance (which unfortunately varied as between man
and man because of past discrepancies in environment, opportunities, and
education) could be equalized by a system of teaching that aimed to
furnish that mental and physical training hitherto absent.

Whether the case was ever so stated in set terms does not matter; very
shortly this became the firm conviction of the great mass of men, and
the modern democracy of method is based on the belief that all men are
equal because they are men, and that free, compulsory, secularized,
state-controlled education can and does remove the last difference that
made possible any discrimination in rights and privileges as between one
man and another.

In another respect, however, the superstition of mechanical evolution
played an important part, and with serious results. Neither the prophets
nor the camp-followers seemed to realize that evolution, while
undoubtedly a law of life within certain limits, was inseparable from
degradation which was its concomitant, that is to say, that as the
rocket rises so must it fall; as man is conceived, born and matures,
even so must he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to
greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human
history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and
then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood,
or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the
annals of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable,
unescapable fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes
a delusion and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to
incipient or crescent dangers; content, self-secure, lost in a vain
dream of manifest destiny they are deaf to warnings, incapable even of
the primary gestures of self-defense. Such was one of the results of
nineteenth-century evolutionism, and the generation that saw the last
years of the nineteenth century and the first part of the new, basking
in its day dreams of self-complacency, made no move to avert the dangers
that threatened it then and now menace it with destruction.

When, therefore, modernism achieved its grand climacteric in July, 1914,
we had on the one hand an imperialism of force, in industry, commerce,
and finance, expressing itself through highly developed specialists, and
dictating the policies and practices of government, society, and
education; on the other, a democracy of form which denied, combated, and
destroyed distinction in personality and authority in thought, and
discouraged constructive leadership in the intellectual, spiritual, and
artistic spheres of activity. The opposition was absolute, the results
catastrophic. The lack of competent leadership in every category of life
finds a sufficient explanation in the two opposed forces, in their
origin and nature, and in the fact of their opposition.

In the somewhat garish light of the War and the Peace, it would not be
difficult to feel a real and even poignant sympathy for two causes that
were prominent and popular in the first fourteen years of the present
century, namely, the philosophy that based itself on a mechanical system
of evolution which predicted unescapable, irreversible human progress,
and that religion which denied the reality of evil in the world. The
plausibility of each was dissipated by the catastrophic events though
both still linger in stubborn unconsciousness of their demise. The
impulse towards sympathy is mitigated by realization of the unfortunate
effect they exerted on history. This is particularly true of
evolutionary philosophy, which was held as an article of faith, either
consciously or sub-consciously, by the greater part of Western society.
Not only did it deter men from realizing the ominous tendency of events
but, more unhappily, it minimized their power to discriminate between
what was good and bad in current society, and even reversed their sense
of comparative values. If man was indeed progressing steadily from bad
to good, and so to better and best, then the vivid and even splendid
life of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its headlong
conquest of the powers of nature, its enormous industrial development,
its vast and ever-increasing wealth in material things, must be not only
an amazing advance beyond any former civilization but positively good in
itself, while the future could only be a progressive magnifying of what
then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr.
Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other
pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will
some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently
acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any
period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches
the sky."

Nothing but a grave inability to estimate values, based on a
pseudo-scientific dogma, can explain the lack of any just standard of
comparative values that was the essential quality in pre-war society.
Extraordinary as were the material achievements of the time, beneficent
in certain ways, and susceptible in part of sometime being used to the
advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in
value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image
which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were
voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into
idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life
were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real
that they were unreal became the object and the measure of achievement.

It was an unhappy and almost fatal attitude of mind, and it was
engendered not so much by the trend of civilization since the
Renaissance and Reformation, nor by the compulsion and cumulative
influence of the things themselves, as by the natural temper and
inclinations and the native standards of this emancipated mass of
humanity that, oppressed, outraged and degraded for four hundred years
had at last burst out of its prison-house and had assumed control of
society through industrialism, politics and social life. The saving
grace of the old aristocracies had disappeared with the institution
itself: between 1875 and 1900 the great single leaders, so fine in
character, so brilliant in capacity, so surprising in their numbers,
that had given a deceptive glory to the so-called Victorian Age, had
almost wholly died out, and the new conditions neither fostered the
development of adequate successors, nor gave audience to the few that,
anomalously, appeared. It is not surprising therefore that the new
social element that had played so masterly a part in bringing to its
perfection the industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should
have developed an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its
materialism, its narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness
and cynicism, on the mind of a society where increasingly their own
followers were, by sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring a predominant
position.

I am not unconscious that these are hard sayings and that few indeed
will accept them. They seem too much like attempting that which Burke
said was impossible, viz., to bring an indictment against a people. I
intend nothing of the sort. Out of this same body of humanity which _as
a whole_ has exerted this very unfavourable influence on modern society,
have come and will come personalities of sudden and startling nobility,
men who have done as great service as any of their contemporaries
whatever their class or status. Out of the depths have come those who
have ascended to the supreme heights, for since Christianity came into
the world to free the souls of men, this new liberty has worked without
limitations of caste or race. Indeed, the very creations of the emergent
force, industrialism and democracy, while they were the betrayal of the
many were the opportunity of the few, taking the place, as they did, of
the older creeds of specifically Christian society, and inviting those
who would to work their full emancipation and so become the servants of
God and mankind. By the very bitterness of their antecedents, the
cruelty of their inheritance, they gained a deeper sense of the reality
of life, a more just sense of right and wrong, a clearer vision of
things as they were, than happened in the case of those who had no such
experience of the deep brutality of the regime of post-Renaissance
society.

True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were
many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers
of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern
life as pervasive and controlling as it is.

What has happened is a certain degradation of character, a weakening of
the moral stamina of men, and against this no mechanical device in
government, no philosophical or social theory, can stand a chance of
successful resistance, while material progress in wealth and trade and
scientific achievement becomes simply a contributory force in the
process of degeneration. For this degradation of character we are bound
to hold this new social force in a measure responsible, even though it
has so operated because of its inherent qualities and in no material
respect through conscious cynicism or viciousness; indeed it is safe to
say that in so far as it was acting consciously it was with good
motives, which adds an element of even greater tragedy to a situation
already sufficiently depressing.

If I am right in holding this to be the effective cause of the situation
we have now to meet, it is true that it is by no means the only one. The
emancipation and deliverance of the downtrodden masses of men who owed
their evil estate to the destruction of the Christian society of the
Middle Ages, was a clamourous necessity; it was a slavery as bad in some
ways as any that had existed in antiquity, and the number of its victims
was greater. The ill results of the accomplished fact was largely due to
the condition of religion which existed during the period of
emancipation. No society can endure without vital religion, and any
revolution effected at a time when religion is moribund or dissipated in
contentious fragments, is destined to be evacuated of its ideals and its
potential, and to end in disaster. Now the freeing of the slaves of the
Renaissance and the post-Reformation, and their absorption in the body
politic, was one of the greatest revolutions in history, and it came at
a time when religion, which had been one and vital throughout Western
Europe for six centuries, had been shattered and nullified, and its
place taken, in the lands that saw the great liberation, by Calvinism,
Lutheranism, Puritanism and atheism, none of which could exert a guiding
and redemptive influence on the dazed hordes that had at last come up
into the light of day.

In point of fact, therefore, we are bound to trace back the
responsibility for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as
well as to the tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and
profligate ordering of society, which followed on the end of
Mediaevalism.

So then we stand today confronting a situation that is ominous and
obscure, since the very ideals and devices which we had held were the
last word in progressive evolution have failed at the crisis, and
because we who created them and have worked through them, have failed in
character, and chiefly because we have accepted low ideals and inferior
standards imposed upon us by social elements betrayed and abandoned by a
world that could not aid them or assimilate them since itself had
betrayed the only thing that could give them force, unity and coherency,
that is, a vital and pervasive religious faith.

There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the
disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast
heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought
nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps natural,
but it is none the less both irrational and wicked. If it is persisted
in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify itself, but
only so. We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination,
we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of our own making,
for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will. What we will that
shall we be, or rather, what we _are_ that shall we will, and if we make
of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then the victory rests
with us. It is true that we are in the last years of a definite period,
on that decline that precedes the opening of a new epoch. Never in
history has any such period overpassed its limit of five hundred years,
and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the fifteenth century,
cannot outlast the present. But these declining years are preceding
those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will
see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is
our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. It is for us
to say what this shall be. It is not foreordained; true, if we will it,
it may be a reign of disaster, a parallel to the well-recognized "Dark
Ages" of history, but also, if we will, it may be a new and a true
"renaissance," a rebirth of old ideals, of old honour, of old faith,
only incarnate in new and noble forms.

The vision of an old heaven and a new earth was vouchsafed us during the
war, when horror and dishonour and degradation were shot through and
through with an epic heroism and chivalry and self-sacrifice. What if
this all did fade in the miasma of Versailles and the cynicism of trade
fighting to get back to "normalcy," and the red anarchy out of the East?
There is no fiat of God that fixes these things as eternal. Even they
also may be made the instruments of revelation and re-creation. Paris
and London, Rome, Berlin and Washington are meshed in the tangled web of
the superannuated who cannot escape the incubus of the old ways and the
old theories that were themselves the cause of the war and of the
failure of "modern civilization," but another generation is taking the
field and we must believe that this has been burned out of them. They
may have achieved this great perfection in the field, they may have
experienced it through those susceptible years of life just preceding
military age. It does not matter. Somehow they have it, and those who
come much in contact in school or college with boys and men between the
ages of seventeen and twenty-five, know, and thankfully confess, that if
they can control the event the future is secure.

In the harlequinade of fabulous material success the nations of "modern
civilization" suffered a moral deterioration, in themselves and in their
individual members; by a moral regeneration they may be saved. How is
this to be accomplished? How, humanly speaking, is the redemption of
society to be achieved? Not alone by change of heart in each individual,
though if this could be it would be enough. Humanly speaking there is
not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby "in the
twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed." Still less by sole
reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and
educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that
can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up
of individuals whose moral sense is defective. Either of these two
methods, put into operation by itself, will fail. Acting together they
may succeed.

I repeat what I have said before. The material thing and the spiritual
force work by inter-action and coördinately. The abandonment or reform
of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution
of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the
individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent
possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this
direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more
possible. With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an
equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the
present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible
changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary
society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the
spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level
through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even
greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the
character-development of the individual. In following out this line of
thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on:
A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic
Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of
Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal
Responsibility.

I am only too conscious of the fact that the division of my subject
under these categorical heads, and the necessities of special argument,
if not indeed of special pleading, have forced me to such particular
stress on each subject as may very likely give an impression of undue
emphasis. If each lecture were to be taken by itself, such an impression
would, I fear, be unescapable; I ask therefore for the courtesy of a
suspension of judgment until the series is completed, for it is only
when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another,
that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.




II


A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]

    [*This lecture has been very considerably re-written
    since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained
    has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix. These
    excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain
    bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures,
    might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it
    has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and
    give them a supplementary place by themselves.]

The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the
technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did
these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the
clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem
is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no
right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human
indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to
expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we
had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even
in spite of the peace. It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the
reason and the meaning of it all.

It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are
searching the way towards "The Great Peace" we must establish some
working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid
like perils in the future. The explanation I assume for myself, and on
which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of
the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application
of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but
was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion.
In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that
had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps
as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void
religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with
life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force
interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite
directions and after certain definite methods.

The rather complete failure of our many modern and ingenious
institutions, the failure of institutionalism altogether, is due far
less to wrong theories underlying them, or to radical defects in their
technique, than it is to this false philosophy and this progressive
abandonment of religion. The wrong theories were there, and the
mechanical defects, for the machines were conditioned by the principle
that lay behind them, but effort at correction and betterment will make
small progress unless we first regain the right religion and a right
philosophy. I said this to Henri Bergson last year in Paris and his
reply was significant as coming from a philosopher. "Yes," he said, "you
are right; and of the two, the religion is the more important."

If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it,
through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy
would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not
matter. On the other hand, without it, no institution can be counted
safe, or will prove efficacious, while no philosophy, however lofty and
magisterial, can take its place, or even play its own part in the life
of man or society. I must in these lectures say much about institutions
themselves, but first I shall try to indicate what seem to me the more
serious errors in current philosophy, leaving until after a study of the
material forms which are so largely conditioned by the philosophical
attitude, the consideration of that religion, both organic and personal,
which I believe can alone verify the philosophy, give the institutions
life and render them reliable agencies for good.

For a working definition of philosophy, in the sense in which I use it
here, I will take two sayings, one out of the thirteenth century, one
from the twentieth. "They are called wise who put things in their right
order and control them well," says St. Thomas Aquinas. "Philosophy is
the science of the totality of things," says Cardinal Mercier, his
greatest contemporary commentator, and he continues, "Philosophy is the
sum-total of reality." Philosophy is the body of _human_ wisdom,
verified and irradiated by divine wisdom. "The science of the totality
of things": not the isolation of individual phenomena, or even of groups
of phenomena, as is the method of the natural sciences, but the setting
of all in their varied relationships and values, the antithesis of that
narrowness and concentration of vision that follow intensive
specialization and have issue in infinite delusions and unrealities,
"Philosophy regards the sum-total of reality" and it achieves this
consciousness of reality, first by establishing right relations between
phenomena, and then, abandoning the explicit intellectual process, by
falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through
those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind,
informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as
media of transmission and communication. So men are enabled by
philosophy "to put things in their right order" and by religion "to
control them well," thus becoming indeed worthy to be "called wise."

Now, from the beginnings of conscious life, man has found himself
surrounded and besieged by un-calculable phenomena. Beaten upon by
forces he could not estimate or predict or control, he has sought to
solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation
between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as
Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to
achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite
lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the
vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most
dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost
mathematical exactness. The peoples of the East rejected the
intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out
through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests
itself in the form of emotion. With the revelation of Christianity came
also, and of course, enlightenment, which was not definite and closed at
some given moment, but progressive and cumulative. At once, speaking
philosophically, the intellectual method of the West and the intuitive
method of the East came together and fused in a new thing, each element
limiting, and at the same time fortifying the other, while the opposed
obscurities of the past were irradiated by the revealing and creative
spirit of Christ. So came the beginnings of that definitive Christian
philosophy which was to proceed from Syria, Anatolia and Constantinople,
through Alexandria to St. Augustine, and was to find its fullest
expression during the Middle Ages and by means of Duns Scotus, Albertus
Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is an interesting fact, though apart from my present consideration,
that this philosophical fusion was paralleled in the same places and at
the same time, by an aesthetic fusion that brought into existence the
first great and consistent art of Christianity. This question is
admirably dealt with in Lisle March Phillipps' "Form and Colour."

This great Christian philosophy which lay behind all the civilization of
the Middle Ages, was positive, comprehensive and new. It demonstrated
divine purpose working consciously through all things with a result in
perfect coherency; it gave history a new meaning as revealing reality
and as a thing forever present and never past, and above all it
elucidated the nature of both matter and spirit and made clear their
operation through the doctrine of sacramentalism.

In the century that saw the consummation of this great philosophical
system--as well as that of the civilization which was its expositor in
material form--there came a separation and a divergence. The balanced
unity was broken, and on the one hand the tendency was increasingly
towards the exaggerated mysticism that had characterized the Eastern
moiety of the synthesis, on the other towards an exaggerated
intellectualism the seeds of which are inherent even in St. Thomas
himself. The new mysticism withdrew further and further from the common
life, finding refuge in hidden sanctuaries in Spain, Italy, the
Rhineland; the old intellectualism became more and more dominant in the
minds of man and the affairs of the world, and with the Renaissance it
became supreme, as did the other qualities of paganism in art as well as
in every other field of human activity.

The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr.
John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread,
distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process
cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of
philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an
equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who
accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the
Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the
protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was
un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the
year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined
through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism
played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of
mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the
nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we
have become through this dominance, coupled with the general
devitalizing or abandonment of religion.

And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy
engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans,
with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is
visible a tendency to get away from the old Pagan static system reborn
with the Renaissance. We can never forget that Bergson has avowed that
"the mind of man, by its very nature, is incapable of apprehending
reality." After this the return towards the scholastic philosophy of the
Middle Ages is not so difficult, nor even its recovery. If we associate
with this process on the part of formal philosophy the very evident, if
sometimes abnormal and exaggerated, progress towards a new mysticism, we
are far from finding ourselves abandoned to despair as to the whole
future of philosophy.

Now this return and this recovery are, I believe, necessary as one of
the first steps towards establishing a sound basis for the building up
of a new and a better civilization, and one that is in fact as well as
in name a Christian civilization. I do not mean that, with this
restoration of Christian philosophy, there we should rest. Both
revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our
broken life were restored, philosophical development would be
continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they
proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy. I think a break of
continuity was effected in the sixteenth century, with disastrous
effects, and until this break is healed we are cut off from what is in a
sense the Apostolical succession of philosophical verity.

Before going further I would guard against two possible misconceptions;
of one of them I have already spoken, that is, the error so frequent in
the past as well as today, that would make of philosophy, however sound,
however consonant with the finalities of revealed religion, a substitute
in any degree for religion itself. Philosophy is the reaction of the
intellect, of man to the stimuli of life, but religion _is_ life and is
therefore in many ways a flat contradiction of the concepts of the
intellect, which is only a small portion of life, therefore limited,
partial, and (because of this) sometimes entirely wrong in its
conclusions independently arrived at along these necessarily
circumscribed lines.

The second possible error is that philosophy is the affair of a small
group of students and specialists, quite outside the purview of the
great mass of men, and that it owes its existence to this same class of
delving scholars, few in number, impractical in their aims, and sharply
differentiated from their fellows. On the contrary it is a vital
consideration for all those who desire to "see life and see it whole" in
order that they may establish a true scale of comparative values and a
right relationship between those things that come from the outside and,
meeting those that come from within, establish that plexus of
interacting force we call life. As for the source of philosophic truth,
Friar Bacon put it well when he said "All the wisdom of philosophy is
created by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that
illumines the minds of men in all wisdom." It is a whimsical
juxtaposition, but the first pastor of the Puritans in America, the Rev.
John Robinson, testifies to the same effect. "All truth," he says, "is
of God ... Wherefore it followeth that nothing true in right reason and
sound philosophy can be false in divinity.... I add, though the truth be
uttered by the devil himself, yet it is originally of God." There are
not two sources of truth, that of Divine Revelation on the one hand,
that of science and philosophy and all the intellectual works of man on
the other. Truth is one, and the Source is one; the channels of
communication alone are different. But truth in its finality, the
Absolute, the _noumenon_ that is the substance of phenomena, is in
itself not a thing that can be directly apprehended by man; it lies
within the "ultra-violet" rays of his intellectual spectrum. "The
trammels of the body prevent man from knowing God in Himself" says
Philo, "He is known only in the Divine forces in which He manifests
Himself." And St. Thomas: "In the present state of life in which the
soul is united to a passable body, it is impossible for the intellect to
understand anything actually except by turning to the phantasm."
Religion confesses this, philosophy constantly tends to forget it,
therefore true religion speaks always through the symbol, rejecting,
because it transcends, the intellectual criterion, while philosophy is
on safe ground only when it unites itself with religion, testing its own
conclusions by a higher reality, and existing not as a rival but as a
coadjutor.

It is St. Paul who declares that "God has never left Himself without a
witness" and the "witness" was explicit, however clouded, in the
philosophies of paganism. Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of
man's mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in
religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility,
with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness. Let me
quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor,
who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of
Migne:

"There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the
true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking
itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and
boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder
of the face of creation.... Then those things which were seen were known
and there were other things which were not known; and through those
which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And
they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining.... So
God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ
crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the
world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had
made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set
for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine
in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain
curiosity to the study of alien things."

Precisely: and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan
philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which
followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and
Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James. The jealously intellectual
philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and
mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such
enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but
"the falsehoods of their own imaginings" of which Hugh of St. Victor
speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and
are losing themselves in the desert they have made.

Meanwhile they have played their part in shaping the destinies of the
world, and it was an ill part, if we may judge from the results that
showed themselves in the events that have been recorded between the year
1800 and the present moment. Just what this influence was in determining
the nature of society, of industrial civilization and of the political
organism I shall try to indicate in some of the following lectures, but
apart from these concrete happenings, this influence was, I am
persuaded, most disastrous in its bearing on human character. Neither
wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the
inherent tendencies of race--the most powerful of all--can avail against
the degenerative force of a life without religion, or, what is worse,
that maintains only a desiccated formula; and the post-Renaissance
philosophies are one and all definitely anti-religious and
self-proclaimed substitutes for religion. As such they were offered and
accepted, and as such they must take their share of the responsibility
for what has happened.

I believe we must and can retrace our steps to that point in time when a
right philosophy was abandoned, and begin again. There is no
impossibility or even difficulty here. History is not a dead thing, a
thing of the past; it is eternally present to man, and this is one of
the sharp differentiations between man and beast. The material monuments
of man crumble and disappear, but the spirit that built the Parthenon or
Reims Cathedral, that inspired St. Paul on Mars' hill or forged Magna
Charta or the Constitution of the United States is, _because of our
quality as men,_ just as present and operative with us today, if we
will, as that which sent the youth of ten nations into a righteous war
five years ago, or spoke yesterday through some noble action that you or
I may have witnessed. It is as easy for us to accept and practice the
philosophy of St. Thomas or the divine humanism of St. Francis as it is
to accept the philosophy of Mr. Wells or the theories of Sir Oliver
Lodge. No spiritual thing dies, or even grows old, nor does it drift
backward in the dwindling perspective of ancient history, and the
foolishest saying of man is that "you cannot turn back the hands of the
clock."

It is simply a question of will, and will is simply a question of desire
and of faith.

Manifestly I cannot be expected to recreate in a few words this
philosophy to which I believe we must have recourse in our hour of need.
I have no ability to do this in any case. It begins with St. Paul, is
continued through St. Augustine, and finds its culmination in the great
Mediaeval group of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and
St. Thomas Aquinas. I do not know of any single book that epitomizes it
all in vital form, though Cardinal Mercier and Dr. De Wulf have written
much that is stimulating and helpful. I cannot help thinking that the
great demand today is for a compact volume that synthesizes the whole
magnificent system in terms not of history and scientific exegesis, but
in terms of life. Plato and Aristotle are so preserved to man, and the
philosophers of modernism also; it is only the magisterial and dynamic
philosophy of Christianity that is diffused through many works, some of
them still untranslated and all quite without coordination, save St.
Thomas Aquinas alone, the magnitude of whose product staggers the human
mind and in its profuseness defeats its own ends. We need no more
histories of philosophy, but we need an epitome of Christian philosophy,
not for students but for men.

Such an epitome I am not fitted to offer, but there are certain rather
fundamental conceptions and postulates that run counter both to pagan
and to modern philosophy, the loss of which out of life has, I maintain,
much to do with our present estate, and that must be regained before we
can go forward with any reasonable hope of betterment. These I will try
to indicate as well as I can.

Christian philosophy teaches, in so far as it deals with the
relationship between man and these divine forces that are forever
building, unbuilding and rebuilding the fabric of life, somewhat as
follows:

The world as we know it, man, life itself as it works through all
creation, is the union of matter and spirit; and matter is not spirit,
nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode of the other, but they are two
different creatures. Apart from this union of matter and spirit there is
no life, in the sense in which we know it, and severance is death. "The
body" says St. Thomas, "is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul,
by the nature of its essence, can be united to the body, so that,
properly speaking, the soul alone is not the species, but the
composite", and Duns Scotus makes clear the nature and origin of this
common "essence" when he says there is "on the one hand God as Infinite
Actuality, on the other spiritual and corporeal substances possessing an
homogeneous common element." That is to say; matter and spirit are both
the result of the divine creative act, and though separate, and in a
sense opposed, find their point of origin in the Divine Actuality.

The created world is the concrete manifestation of matter, through
which, for its transformation and redemption, spirit is active in a
constant process of interpenetration whereby matter itself is being
eternally redeemed. What then is matter and what is spirit? The question
is of sufficient magnitude to absorb all the time assigned to these
lectures, with the strong possibility that even then we should be
scarcely wiser than before. For my own purposes, however, I am content
to accept the definition of matter formulated by Duns Scotus, which
takes over the earlier definition of Plotinus, purges it of its elements
of pagan error, and redeems it by Christian insight.

"Materia Primo Prima" says the great Franciscan, "is the indeterminate
element of contingent things. This does not exist in Nature, but it has
reality in so far as it constitutes the term of God's creative activity.
By its union with a substantial form it becomes endowed with the
attributes of quantity, and becomes Secundo Prima. Subject to the
substantial changes of Nature, it becomes matter as we see it."

It is this "Materia Primo Prima," the term of God's creative activity,
that is eternally subjected to the regenerative process of spiritual
interpenetration, and the result is organic life.

What is spirit? The creative power of the Logos, in the sense in which
St. John interprets and corrects the early, partial, and therefore
erroneous theories of the Stoics and of Philo. God the Son, the Eternal
Word of the Father, "the brightness of His glory and the figure of His
Substance." "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten,
not made, being of one substance with the Father: by Whom all things
were made." Pure wisdom, pure will, pure energy, unconditioned by
matter, but creating life out of the operation of the Holy Spirit on and
through matter, and in the fullness of time becoming Incarnate for the
purpose of the final redemption of man.

Now since man is so compact of matter and spirit, it must follow that he
cannot lay hold of pure spirit, the Absolute that lies beyond and above
all material conditioning, except through the medium of matter, through
its figures, its symbols, its "phantasms." Says St. Thomas: "From
material things we can rise to some kind of knowledge of immaterial
things, but not to the perfect knowledge thereof." The way of life
therefore, is the incessant endeavour of man sacramentally to approach
the Absolute through the leading of the Holy Spirit, so running parallel
to the slow perfecting of matter which is being effected by the same
operation. So matter itself takes on a certain sanctity, not only as
something susceptible, and in process, of perfection, but as the vehicle
of spirit and its tabernacle, since in matter spirit is actually
incarnate.

From this process follows of necessity the whole sacramental system, in
theology, philosophy and operation, of Christianity. It is of its
_esse;_ its great original, revolutionary and final contribution to the
wisdom that man may have for his own, and it follows inevitably from the
basic facts of the Incarnation and Redemption, which are also its
perfect showing forth.

Philosophically this is the great contribution of Christianity and for
fifteen centuries it was held implicitly by Christendom, yet it was
rejected, either wholly or in part, by the Protestant organizations that
came out of the Reformation, and it fell into such oblivion that outside
the Catholic Church it was not so much ignored or rejected as totally
forgotten. Recently a series of lectures were delivered at King's
College, London, by various carefully chosen authorities, all
specialists in their own fields, under the general title "Mediaeval
Contributions to Modern Civilization," and neither the pious author of
the address on "The Religious Contribution of the Middle Ages," nor the
learned author of that on "Mediaeval Philosophy," gave evidence of ever
having heard of sacramental philosophy. It may be that I do them an
injustice, and that they would offer as excuse the incontestible fact
that Mediaevalism contributed nothing to "modern civilization," either
in religion or philosophy, that it was willing to accept.

The peril of all philosophies, outside that of Christianity as it was
developed under the Catholic dispensation, is dualism, and many have
fallen into this grave error. Now dualism is not only the reversal of
truth, it is also the destroyer of righteousness.


Sacramentalism is the anthithesis of dualism. The sanctity of matter as
the potential of spirit and its dwelling-place on earth; the humanizing
of spirit through its condescension to man through the making of his
body and all created things its earthly tabernacle, give, when carried
out into logical development, a meaning to life, a glory to the world,
an elucidation of otherwise unsolvable mysteries, and an impulse toward
noble living no other system can afford. It is a real philosophy of
life, a standard of values, a criterion of all possible postulates, and
as its loss meant the world's peril, so its recovery may mean its
salvation.

Now as the philosophy of Christianity is purely and essentially
sacramental, so must be the operation of God through the Church. This
"Body of Christ" on earth is indeed a fellowship, a veritable communion
of the faithful, whether living or dead, but it is also a divine
organism which lives, and in which each member lives, not by the
preaching of the Word, not even by and through the fellowship in living
and worship, but through the ordained channels of grace known as the
Sacraments. In accordance with the sacramental system, every material
thing is proclaimed as possessing in varying degree sacramental
potentiality, while seven great Sacraments were instituted to be, each
after its own fashion, a special channel for the inflowing of the power
of the Divine Actuality. Each is a symbol, just as so many other created
things are, or may become, symbols, but they are also _realities,_
veritable media for the veritable communications of veritable divine
grace. Here is the best definition I know, that of Hugh of St. Victor.
"A sacrament is the corporeal or material element set out sensibly,
representing from its similitude, signifying from its institution, and
containing from its sanctification, some invisible and spiritual grace."
This is the unvarying and invariable doctrine of historic Christianity,
and the reason for the existence of the Church as a living and
functioning organism. The whole sacramental system is in a sense an
extension, in time, of the Redemption, just as one particular Sacrament,
the Holy Eucharist, is also in a sense an extension of the Incarnation,
as it is also an extension, in time, of the Atonement, the Sacrifice of
Calvary.

The Incarnation and the Redemption are not accomplished facts, completed
nineteen centuries ago; they are processes that still continue, and
their term is fixed only by the total regeneration and perfecting of
matter, while the Seven Sacraments are the chiefest amongst an infinity
of sacramental processes which are the agencies of this eternal
transfiguration.

God the Son became Incarnate, not only to accomplish the redemption of
men as yet unborn, for endless ages, through the Sacrifice of Calvary,
but also to initiate and forever maintain a new method whereby this
result was to be more perfectly attained; that is to say, the Church,
working through the specific sacramental agencies He had ordained, or
was from time to time to ordain, through His everlasting presence in the
Church He had brought into being at Pentecost. He did not come to
establish in material form a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to provide
for its ultimate coming. He indeed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His
Church, "in the world, not of it," which is a very different matter
indeed, as the centuries have proved. His Kingdom is not of this world,
nor will it be established here. There has been no _absolute_ advance in
human development since the Incarnation. Nations rise and fall, epochs
wax and wane, civilizations grow out of savagery, crest and sink back
into savagery and oblivion. Redemption is for the individual, not for
the race, nor yet for society as a whole. Then, and only then, and under
that form, it is sure, however long may be the period of its
accomplishment. "Time is the ratio of the resistance of matter to the
interpenetration of spirit," and by this resistance is the duration of
time determined. When it shall have been wholly overcome then "time
shall be no more."

See therefore how perfect is the correspondence between the Sacraments
and the method of life where they are the agents, and which they
symbolically set forth. There is in each case the material form and the
spiritual substance, or energy. Water, chrism, oil, the spoken word, the
touch of hands, the sign of the cross, and finally and supremely the
bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist. Each a material thing, but each
representing, signifying and containing some gift of the Holy Spirit,
real, absolute and potent. So matter and spirit are linked together in
every operation of the Church, from the cradle to the grave, and man has
ever before him the eternal revelation of this linked union of matter
and spirit in his life, the eternal teaching of the honour of the
material thing through its agency and through its existence as the
subject for redemption. So also, through the material association, and
the divine condescension to his earthly and fallible estate (limited by
association with matter only to inadequate presentation) he makes the
Spirit of God his own, to dwell therewith after the fashion of man.

And how much this explains and justifies: Man approaches, and must
always approach, spiritual things not only through material forms but by
means of material agencies. The highest and most beautiful things, those
where the spirit seems to achieve its loftiest reaches, are frequently
associated with the grossest and most unspiritual forms, yet the very
splendour of the spiritual verity redeems and glorifies the material
agency, while on the other hand the homeliness, and even animal quality,
of the material thing, brings to man, with a poignancy and an appeal
that are incalculable, the spiritual thing that, in its absolute
essence, would be so far beyond his ken and his experience and his
powers of assimilation that it would be inoperative.

This is the true Humanism; not the fictitious and hollow thing that was
the offspring of neo-paganism and took to itself a title to which it had
no claim. Held tacitly or consciously by the men of the Middle Ages,
from the immortal philosopher to the immortal but nameless craftsman, it
was the force that built up the noble social structure of the time and
poised man himself in a sure equilibrium. Already it had of necessity
developed the whole scheme of religious ceremonial and given art a new
content and direction through its new service. By analogy and
association all material things that could be so used were employed as
figures and symbols, as well as agencies, through the Sacraments, and
after a fashion that struck home to the soul through the organs of
sense. Music, vestments, incense, flowers, poetry, dramatic action, were
linked with the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, and
all became not only ministers to the emotional faculties but direct
appeals to the intellect through their function as poignant symbols. So
art received its soul, and was almost a living creature until matter and
spirit were again divorced in the death that severed them during the
Reformation. Thereafter religion had entered upon a period of slow
desiccation and sterilization wherever the symbol was cast away with the
Sacraments and the faith and the philosophy that had made it live. The
bitter hostility to the art and the liturgies and the ceremonial of the
Catholic faith is due far less to ignorance of the meaning and function
of art and to an inherited jealousy of its quality and its power, than
it is to the conscious and determined rejection of the essential
philosophy of Christianity, which is sacramentalism.

The whole system was of an almost sublime perfection and simplicity, and
the formal Sacraments were both its goal and its type. If they had been
of the same value and identical in nature they would have failed of
perfect exposition, in the sense in which they were types and symbols.
They were not this, for while six of the explicit seven were
substantially of one mode, there was one where the conditions that held
elsewhere were transcended, and where, in addition to the two functions
it was instituted to perform it gave, through its similitude, the clear
revelation of the most significant and poignant fact in the vast mystery
of life. I mean, of course, the Holy Eucharist, commonly called the
Mass.

If matter is _per se_ forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then
we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand,
Manichaean dualism on the other. Even under the most spiritual
interpretation we could offer--that, shall we say, of those today who
try to run with the hare of religion and hunt with the hounds of
rationalistic materialism--matter and spirit unite in man as body and
soul, and in the Sacraments as the vehicle and the essence, but
temporally and temporarily; doomed always to ultimate severance by death
in the one case, by the completion of the sacramental process in the
other. If, on the other hand, the object of the universe and of time is
the constant redemption and transformation of matter through its
interpenetration by spirit in the power of God the Holy Ghost, then we
escape the falsities of dualism, while in the miracle of the Mass we
find the type and the showing forth of the constant process of life
whereby every instant, matter itself is being changed and glorified and
transferred from the plane of matter to the plane of spirit.

If this is so: if the Incarnation and the Redemption are not only
fundamental facts but also types and symbols of the divine process
forever going on here on earth, then, while the other Sacraments are in
themselves not only instruments of grace but manifestations of that
process whereby in all things matter is used as the vehicle of spirit,
the Mass, transcending them all, is not only Communion, not only a
Sacrifice acceptable before God, it is also the unique symbol of the
redemption and transformation of matter; since, of all the Sacraments,
it is the only one where the very physical qualities of the material
vehicle are transformed, and while the accidents alone remain, the
substance, finite and perishable, becomes, in an instant of time and by
the operation of God, infinite and immortal.

It is to sacramentalism then that we must return, not only in religion
and its practice, but in philosophy, if we are to establish a firm
foundation for that newer society and civilization that are to help us
to achieve the "Great Peace." Antecedent systems failed, and subsequent
systems have failed; in this alone, the philosophy of Christianity, is
there safety, for it alone is consonant with the revealed will of God.




III


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

Society, that is to say, the association in life of men, women and
children, is the fundamental fact of life, and this is so whether the
association is of the family, the school, the community, industry or
government. Everything else is simply a series of forms, arrangements
and devices by which society works, either for good or ill. Man makes or
mars himself in and through society. He is responsible for his own soul,
but if he sees only this and works directly for his soul's salvation,
disregarding the society of which he is a part, he may lose it, whereas,
if he is faithful to society and honourably plays his part as a social
animal with a soul, he will very probably save it, even though he may
for the time have quite ignored its existence. Man is a member of a
family, a pupil under education, a worker and a citizen. In all these
relationships he is a part of a social group; he is also a component
part of the human race and linked in some measure to every other member
thereof whether living or dead. Into every organization or institution
in which he is involved during his lifetime--family, school, art or
craft, trade union, state, church--enters the social equation. If
society is ill organized either in theory or in practice, in any or all
of its manifestations, then the engines or devices by which it operates
will be impotent for good. Defective society cannot produce either a
good fundamental law, a good philosophy, a good art, or any other thing.
Conversely, these, when brought forth under an wholesome society, will
decay and perish when society degenerates.

In its large estate, that is, comprehending all the minor groups, as a
nation, a people or an era, society is always in a state of unstable
equilibrium, tending either toward better or worse. It may indeed be of
the very essence of human life, but it is a plant of tender growth and
needs delicate nurture and jealous care; a small thing may work it
irreparable injury. It may reach very great heights of perfection and
spread over a continent, as during the European Middle Ages; it may sink
to low depths with an equal dominion, as in the second dark ages of the
nineteenth century. Sometimes little enclaves of high value hide
themselves in the midst of degradation, as Venice and Ireland in the
Dark Ages. Always, by the grace of God, the primary social unit, the
family may, and frequently does, achieve and maintain both purity and
beauty when the world without riots in ruin and profligacy.

I have taken the problem of the organization of society as the first to
be considered, for it is fundamental. If society is of the wrong shape
it does not matter in the least how intelligent and admirable may be the
devices we construct for the operation of government or industry or
education; they may be masterly products of human intelligence but they
will not work, whereas on the other hand a sane, wholesome and decent
society can so interpret and administer clumsy and defective instruments
that they will function to admiration. A perfect society would need no
such engines at all, but a perfect society implies perfect individuals,
and I think we are now persuaded that a society of this nature is a
purely academic proposition both now and in the calculable future. What
we have to do is to take mankind as it is; made up of infinitely varied
personalities ranging from the idiot to the "super-man"; cruel and
compassionate, covetous and self-sacrificing, silly and erudite, cynical
and emotional, vulgar and cultured, brutal and fastidious, shameful in
their degradation and splendid in their honour and chivalry, and by the
franchise of liberty and the binding of law, facilitate in every way the
process whereby they themselves work out their own salvation. You cannot
impose morality by statute or guarantee either character or intelligence
by the perfection of the machine. Every institution, good or bad, is the
result of growth from many human impulses, not the creation of
autocratic fiat. But growth may be impeded, hastened, or suspended, and
the most that can be done is to offer incentives to action, remove the
obstacles to development, and establish conditions and influences that
make more easy the finding of the right way.

Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of
a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything
of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy
which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and
potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses
them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours. In
questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism
and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose,
attacking precisely the two institutions which are today--or at all
events have been until very recently--held in most conspicuous honour by
the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for
my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature,
and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.

The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore
absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the
matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with
politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate
problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human
scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of
immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the
quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative
standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited
catastrophe. In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have
in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution
which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others
of his kind.

The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very
energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly
mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these
energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate
past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the
Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God.
There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of
death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man,
perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable
that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale,
though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community
made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the
human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With
society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and
geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with
all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is
simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the
delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the
thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush
of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the
eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot
out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the
jackal and the python come again into their heritage.

Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli
and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits
of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link
imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more
ignominious fall.

I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the
quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but
even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come
many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and
exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they
exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed
1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which
degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of
industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance,
capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized
education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches
"run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity
agents."

Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society
with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social
group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding
stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local
trade or craft guild and to his parish church: the essence of wholesome
association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he
knows personally--and preferably so well that he calls them all by their
first names.

As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals
whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of
personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to
the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which
covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential
matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He
votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he
knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another
group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the
United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds
himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if
he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps,
except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or
in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he
find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind
and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of
potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human
animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and
quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.

Of course the result of this is that men are forced into unnatural
associations, many of which are purely artificial and all of which are
unsound. It is true that the trade union, the professional society, the
club are natural and wholesome expressions of common and intimate
interests, but they acquire a false value when they are not balanced and
regulated by a prior and more compelling association which cuts, not
vertically but horizontally through society, that is to say, the
neighbourhood or community group. The harsh and perilous division into
classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of
"class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this
imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human
scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money,
manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a
human unit or an essential factor in a workable society.

It is hard to see just how we are to re-fashion this impossible society
in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is
universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the
greatest achievement of man. It is practically impossible for any one
today to conceive of a world where great empires, populous cities, mills
and factories and iron-works in their thousands, and employing their
millions through their billions of capitalization, where the stock
exchange and the great banking houses and the insurance companies and
the department stores, the nation-wide trade unions and professional
associations and educational foundations and religious corporations, do
not play their predominant part. Nevertheless they are an aggregation of
false values, their influence is anti-social, and their inherent
weakness was so obviously revealed through the War and the Peace that it
has generally escaped notice.

There seem but two ways in which the true scale of life can be restored;
either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more
unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos,
and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before
after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as
we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as we always can
from the annals of monasticism, build our small communities of the right
shape and scale in the very midst of the imperial states themselves, so
becoming perhaps the leavening of the lump. This of course is what the
monasteries of St. Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the
Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the
Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and
failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already
begun.

The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is
that they are infected with the very imperialism in scale that has
produced the conditions they would redeem. Socialism is now as
completely materialistic as the old capitalism, and as international in
its scope and methods. Anarchy is becoming imperial and magnificent in
its operations. Secular reformers must organize vast committees with
intricate ramifications and elaborate systems supported by "drives" for
money which must run into at least seven figures, and by vast and
efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and
then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation
enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has
now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and
nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is
conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by
efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of
propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising. A
good deal can be bought this way, but it will not "stay bought," for no
reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since
reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it
will be by the cumulative process.

I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for
it vitiates every institution we have. Here, where I am dealing with
society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome
society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations
of every sort. It will reverse the whole system of specialization and
the segregation and unification of industries and the division of
labour. It will build upward from the primary unit of the family,
through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and
self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying
force which links together a federation of states. In general it will be
a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of
a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent,
and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common
lands in England.

The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been
recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became
operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two
centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral
practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and
towards the unit of human scale. In every case however, the introduction
of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually
materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature.
Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of
human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the
elimination of private property and the negation of sacred
individuality. Its institution implies an almost immediate descent into
anarchy with a sequent dictatorship and autocracy, for it is the
reversal of the foundation laws of life. Such reversals cannot last,
nothing can last that is inimical to flourishing life; it may triumph
for a day but life itself sloughs it off as a sound body rids itself of
some foreign substance through the sore that festers, bursts and, the
septic conditions done away with, heals itself and returns to normal.

Now the inhuman scale has produced one set of septic conditions in
society while what is commonly called "democratization" has produced
another. We have a bloated society, but also we have one in which a
false theory has grown up and been put in practice, in accordance with
which an uniformity of human kind has been assumed which never has
existed and does not now, and in the effort to enforce this false theory
the achievement of distinction has been impeded, leadership discouraged
and leaders largely eliminated, the process of leveling downward carried
to a very dangerous point, the sane and vital organization of society
brought near to an end and a peculiarly vicious scale and standard of
social values established. I have urged the return to human scale in
human associations, but this does not imply any admixture of communism,
which is its very antithesis, still less does it permit the retention of
the theoretical uniformity and the unescapable leveling process of
so-called democracy.

Before the law all men are equal, that is, they are entitled to
even-handed justice. Before God all men are equal, that is, they are
granted charity and mercy which transcends the law, also they possess
immortal souls of equal value. Here their equality stops. In every other
respect they vary in character, capacity, intelligence and potentiality
for development along any or all these lines, almost beyond the limits
of computation. A sane society will recognize this, it will organize
itself accordingly, it will deny to one what it will concede to another,
it will foster emulation and reward accomplishment, and it will add
another category to those in which all men are equal, that is, the
freest scope for advancement, and the greatest facility for passing from
one social group into another, the sole test being demonstrated merit.

I am prepared at this point to use the word "aristocracy" for we have
the thing even now, only in its worst possible form. The word itself
means two things: a government by the best and most able citizens and,
to quote a standard dictionary "Persons noted for superiority in any
character or quality, taken collectively." There is no harm here, but
the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic
government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without
responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or
quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the
touchstones to recognition and acceptance. The latter are the antithesis
of Christianity and common sense, the former is consonant with both and,
paradoxical as it may seem, it is also the fulfilling of the ideals of a
real democracy, since its honours and distinctions imply service, its
relations with those in other estates are reciprocal, it is not a closed
caste but the prize of meritorious achievement, and it is therefore
equality of opportunity, utilization of ability and the abolition of
privilege without responsibility.

Men are forever and gloriously struggling onward towards better things,
but there is always the gravitational pull of original sin which
scientists denominate "reversion to type." The saving grace in the
individual is the divine gift of faith, hope and charity implanted in
every soul. These every man must guard and cherish for they are the way
of advancement in character. But society is man in association with men,
in a sense a new and complex personality, and the same qualities are as
necessary here as in the individual. Society, like man, may be said to
possess body, soul and spirit, and it must function vitally along all
these lines if it is to maintain a normal and wholesome existence.
Somewhere there must be something that achieves high ideals of honour,
chivalry, courtesy; that maintains right standards of comparative value,
and that guards the social organism as a whole from the danger of
surrender to false and debased standards, to plausible demagogues, and
to mob-psychology.


The greater the prevalence of democratic methods, the greater is the
danger of this surrender to propaganda of a thousand sorts and to the
dominance of the demagogue, and the existence of an estate fortified by
the inheritance of high tradition, measurably free from the necessity of
engaging too strenuously in the "struggle for life," guaranteed security
of status so long as it does not betray the ideals of its order, but
open to accessions from other estates on the basis of conspicuous merit
alone, such a force operating in society has proved, and will prove, the
best guardian of civilization as a whole and of the interests and
liberties of those who may rank in what are known as lower social
scales.

But, it may be objected, such an institution as this has never existed.
Every political or social aristocracy in history has been mixed and
adulterated with bad characters and recreant representatives. There
never has been and never will be a perfect aristocracy. Quite true;
neither has there ever been a perfect democracy, or a perfect monarchy
for that matter. As men we work with imperfections, but we live by
faith, and our sole duty is to establish the highest ideals, and to
compass them, in so far as we may, with unfailing courage, patience and
steadfastness. The _ideal_ of democracy is a great ideal, but the
_working_ of democracy has been a failure because, amongst other things,
it has tried to carry on without the aid of true aristocracy. If the two
can be united, first in ideal and in theory, then in operation, our
present failure may be changed into victory.

What, after all, does this imply, so far as the social organism is
concerned? It seems to me, something like this. First of all,
recognition of the fact that there are differences in individuals, in
strains of blood, in races, that cannot be overcome by any power of
education and environment, and can only be changed through very long
periods of time, and that these differences must work corresponding
differences in position, function and status in the social organism.
Second, that since society automatically develops an aristocracy of some
sort or other, and apparently cannot be stopped from doing this, it must
be protected from the sort of thing it has produced of late, which is
based on money, political expediency and the unscrupulous cleverness of
the demagogue, and given a more rational substitute in the shape of a
permanent group representing high character and the traditions of
honour, chivalry and courtesy. Third, that character and service should
be fostered and rewarded by that formal and august recognition, that
secure and unquestioned status, and those added opportunities for
service that will form a real and significant distinction. Finally, that
this order or estate must be able to purge itself of unworthy material,
and also must be freely open to constant accessions from without,
whatever the source, and for proved character and service.

I fear I must argue this case of the inequality in individual potential,
that inequality that does not yield to complex education or favourable
environment, for it is fundamental. If it does not exist, then my
argument for the organization of society along lines that recognize and
regularize diversity of social status and functions, falls to the
ground. I affirm that, the doctrine of evolution and modern democratic
theory to the contrary, it does exist and that the mitigating influence
of education, environment and inherited acquired characters, is small at
best.

Let us take the most obvious concrete examples. There are certain ethnic
units or races which for periods ranging from five hundred to two
thousand years have produced _character_, and through character the
great contributions that have been made to human culture and have been
expressed through men of distinction, dynamic force, and vivid
personality. Such, amongst many, are the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans,
the Normans, the Franks, the "Anglo-Saxons," and the Celts. There are
others that in all history have produced nothing. There are certain
family names which are a guarantee of distinction, dynamic force, and
vivid personality. There are thousands of these names, and they are to
be found amongst all the races that have contributed towards the
development of culture and civilization. On the other hand, there are
far more that have produced nothing distinctive, and possibly never
will.

What is the reason for this? Is it the result of blind chance, of
accidents that have left certain races and families isolated in stagnant
eddies from which some sudden current of a whimsical tide might sweep
them out into the full flood of progress, until they then overtook and
passed their hitherto successful rivals, who, in their turn, would drift
off into progressive incompetence and degeneracy? Biology does not look
with enthusiasm on the methods of chance and accident. The choice and
transmission of the forty-eight chromosomes that give to each individual
his character-potential are probably in accordance with some obscure
biological law through which the unfathomable divine will operates. Now
these chromosomes may be selected and combined after a fashion, and with
a persistence of continuity, that would guarantee character-potential,
for good or for ill, through many generations, or they might be so
varied in their combinations that no distinct traits would be carried
over from one generation to another. As a matter of experience all these
three processes take place and are recorded in families of distinct
quality, good, bad and indifferent. If the character-potential is
predetermined, then manifestly education and environment can play only
the subordinate part of fostering its development or retarding it.

In the same way the character and career of the various races of men are
determined by the potential inherent in the individuals and families
that compose them, and like them the races themselves are for long
periods marked by power and capacity or weakness and lack of
distinction. There are certain races, such as the Hottentot, the Malay,
the American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and
Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as
recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive. There
are family units, poverty-stricken and incompetent, in Naples, Canton,
East Side New York; or opulent and aggressive in West Side New York, in
Birmingham, Westphalia, Pittsburgh, that are no more subject to the
cultural and character-creating influences of education and
environment--beyond a certain definite point--than are the amphibians of
Africa or the rampant weeds of my garden.

This is a hard saying and a provocative. The entire course of democratic
theory, of humanitarian thought and of the popular type of scientific
speculation stands against it, and the Christian religion as well,
unless the statement itself is guarded by exact definitions. If the
contention of the scientific materialist were correct, and the thing
that makes man, and that Christians call the immortal soul, were but the
result of physical processes of growth and differentiation, then slavery
would be justifiable, and exploitation a reasonable and inevitable
process. Since, however, this assumption of materialism is untenable,
and since all men are possessed of immortal souls between which is no
distinction in the sight of God, the situation, regrettable if you like,
is one which at the same time calls for the exercise of a higher
humanitarianism than that so popular during the last generation, and as
well for a very drastic revision of contemporary political and social
and educational methods.

The soul of the man is the localization of divinity; in a sense each man
is a manifestation of the Incarnation. Black or white, conspicuous or
obscure, intelligent or stupid, offspring of a creative race or bound by
the limitations of one that is static or in process of decay, there is
no difference in the universal claim to justice, charity, and
opportunity. The soul of a Cantonese river-man, of a Congo slave, of an
East Side Jew, is in itself as essentially precious and worth saving as
the soul of a bishop, of a descendant of a Norman viking or an Irish
king, or that of a volunteer soldier in the late armies of France or
Great Britain or the United States.

Here lies absolute and final equality, and the State, the Law, the
Church are bound to guard this equality in the one case and the other
with equal force; indeed, those of the lower racial and family types
claim even more faithful guardianship than those of the higher, for they
can accomplish less for themselves and by themselves. But the
fundamental and inescapable inequality, in intellect, in character, and
in capacity, which I insist is one of the conditioning factors in life,
is vociferously denied, but ruthlessly enforced, by the people that will
be the first to denounce any restatement of what is after all no more
than a patent fact.

A little less enthusiasm for shibboleths, and a little more intelligent
regard for history and palpable conditions, will show that the assumed
equality between men "on the strength of their manhood alone," the
sufficiency of education for correcting the accidental differences that
show themselves, and the scheme of life that is worked out along
democratic lines on the basis of this essential (or potential) equality,
are "fond things vainly imagined" which must be radically modified
before the world can begin a sane and wholesome building-up after the
great purgation of war.

That equality between men which exists by virtue of the presence in each
of an immortal soul, involves an even distribution of justice and the
protection of law, without distinction of persons, and an even measure
of charity and compassion, but it does not involve the admission of a
claim to equality of action or the denial of varied status, since
race-values, both of blood and of the _gens_ enter in to establish
differences in character, in intelligence and in capacity which cannot
be changed by education, environment or heredity within periods which
are practical considerations with society. If we could still hold the
old Darwinian dogmas of the origin of species through the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest, and if the equally august and
authoritative dogma of the transmission by inheritance of acquired
characteristics were longer tenable, then perhaps we might invoke faith,
hope and patience and continue our generous method of imperilling
present society while we fixed our eyes on the vision of that to come
when environment, education and heredity had accomplished their perfect
work. Unfortunately--or perhaps fortunately--science is rapidly
reconsidering its earlier and somewhat hasty conclusions, and the
consensus of the most authoritative opinion seems to be that we must
believe these things no longer. Failing these premises, on which we have
laboured so long and so honestly and so sincerely, we are again thrown
back on the testimony of history and our own observation, and with this
reversal we also are bound to reconsider both our premises and the
constitution of those systems and institutions we have erected on them
as a foundation.

The existence of a general law does not exclude exceptions. The fact
that in the case of human beings we have to take into consideration a
powerful factor that does not come into play in the domain of zoölogy
and botany--the immortal soul--makes impossible the drawing of exact
deductions from precedents therein established. This determining touch
of the divine, which is no result of biological processes, but stands
outside the limitations of heredity and environment and education, may
manifest itself quite as well in one class as in another, for "God is no
respecter of persons." As has been said before, there is no difference
in degree as between immortal souls. The point is, however, that each is
linked to a specific congeries of tendencies, limitations, effective or
defective agencies, that are what they have been made by the parents of
the race. These may be such as enable the soul to triumph in its earthly
experience and in its bodily housing; they may be such as will bring
about failure and defeat. It is not that the soul builds itself "more
stately mansions"; it is that these are provided for it by the physical
processes of life, and it is almost the first duty of man to see that
they are well built.

Again, the soul is single and personal; as it is not a plexus of
inherited tendencies, so it is not heritable, and a great soul showing
suddenly in the dusk of a dull race contributes nothing of its essential
quality to the issue of the body it has made its house. The stews of a
mill town may suddenly be illuminated by the radiance of a divine soul,
to the amazement of profligate parents and the confusion of eugenists;
but unless the unsolvable mystery of life has determined on a new
species, and so by a sudden influx of the _élan vital_ cuts off the line
of physical succession and establishes one that is wholly new, then the
brightness dies away with the passing of the splendid soul, and the
established tendencies resume their sway.

The bearing of this theory on the actions of society is immediate.
Through the complete disregard of race-values that has obtained during
the last two or three centuries, and the emergence and complete
supremacy in all categories of life of human groups of low potential,
civilization has been brought down to a level where it is threatened
with disaster. If recovery is to be effected and a second era of "dark
ages" avoided, there must be an entirely new evaluation of things, a new
estimate of the principles and methods that obtained under Modernism,
and a fearless adventure into fields that may prove not to be so
unfamiliar as might at first appear.

Specifically, we must revise our attitude as to immigration, excluding
whole classes, and even races, that we have hitherto welcomed with open
hands from the disinterested offices of steamship companies: we must
control and in some cases prohibit, the mating of various racial stocks;
finally we must altogether disallow the practice of changing, by law,
one race-name for another. This process is one for which no excuse
exists and unless it can be brought to an end then, apart from certain
physical differentiations on which nature wisely insists, we have no
guaranty against the adulteration that has gone so far towards
substituting the mongrel for the pure racial type, while society is
bound to suffer still further deception and continued danger along the
lines that have recently been indicated by the transformation of
Treibitsch into "Lincoln," Braunstein into "Trotsky" and Samuels into
"Montague."

For its fulfillment, then, and its regeneration, the real democracy
demands and must achieve the creation and cooperation of a real
aristocracy, not an aristocracy of material force either military or
civil, nor one of land owners or money-getters, nor one of artificial
caste. All these substitutes have been tried from time to time, in Rome,
China, Great Britain, the United States, and all have failed in the end,
for all have ignored the one essential point of _character_, without
which we shall continue to reproduce what we have at present; a thing as
insolent, offensive and tyrannical as the old aristocracies at their
worst, with none of the constructive and beneficent qualities of the old
aristocracies at their best.

That race-values have much to do with this development of character I
believe to be true, but of far greater efficiency, indeed the actual
motive force, is the Christian religion, working directly on and through
the individual and using race as only one of its material means of
operation. Democracy has accomplished its present failure, not only
because it could not function without the cooperation of aristocracy,
but chiefly because, in its modernist form, it has become in fact
isolated from Christianity. All in it of good it derives from that
Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages which first put it into
practice, all in it of evil it owes to a falling back on paganism and a
denial of its own parentage and rejection of its control. I shall deal
with this later in more detail; I speak of it now just for the purpose
of entering a caveat against any deduction from what I have said that
any natural force, of race or evolution or anything else, or any formal
institution devised by man, ever has, or ever can, serve in itself as a
way of social redemption. I am anxious not to overemphasize these things
on which the development of my argument forces me to lay particular
stress.

For those who can go with me so far, the question will arise: How then
are we so to reorganize society that we may gain the end in view? It is
a question not easy of solution. Granted the fact of social
differentiation and the necessity of its recognition, how are we to
break down the wholly wrong system that now obtains and substitute
another in its place? It would be simple enough if within the period
allowed us by safety (apparently not any too extended at the present
moment) a working majority of men could achieve, in the old and exact
phraseology, that change of heart, that spiritual conversion, that would
bring back into permanent authority the supernatural virtues of faith,
hope, and charity, and that sense of right values in life, which
together make almost indifferent the nature of the formal devices man
creates for the organization of society. Certainly this is possible;
greater miracles have happened in history but, failing this, what?

One turns of course by instinct to old models, but in this is the danger
of an attempt at an archaeological restoration, a futile effort at
reviving dead forms that have had their day. In principle, and in the
working as well, the old orders of chivalry or knighthood strongly
commend themselves, for here there was, in principle, both the
maintenance of high ideals of honour courtesy and _noblesse oblige,_ and
the rendering of chivalrous service. Chesterton has put it well in the
phrase "the giving things which cannot be demanded, the avoiding things
which cannot be punished." Moreover, admission to the orders of
knighthood was free to all provided there were that cause which came
from personal character alone. Knighthood was the crown of knightly
service and it was forfeited for recreancy. Is there not in this some
suggestion of what may again be established as an incentive and a
reward, and as well, as a vital agency for the reorganization of
society?

Knighthood is personal, and is for the lifetime of the recipient. Is
there any value in an estate where status is heritable? If there is any
validity in the theory of varying and persistent race-values, it would
seem so, yet the idea of recognizing this excellence of certain families
and the reasonable probability of their maintaining the established
standard unimpaired, and so giving them a formal status, would no doubt
be repugnant to the vast majority of men in the United States. I think
this aversion is based on prejudice, natural but ill-founded. We resent
the idea of privilege without responsibility, as we should, but this,
while it was the condition of those aristocracies which were operative
at the time of the founding of the Republic, was opposed to the
Mediaeval, or true idea, which linked responsibility with privilege. The
old privilege is gone and cannot be restored, but already we have a new
privilege which is being claimed and enforced by proletarian groups, and
the legislative representatives of the whole people stand in such terror
of massed votes that they not only fail to check this astonishing and
topsy-turvy movement, but actually further its pretensions. The
"dictatorship of the proletariat" actually means the restoration of
privilege in a form far more tyrannical and monstrous than any ever
exercised by the old aristocracies of Italy, France, Germany and
England. Much recent legislation in Washington exempting certain
industrial and agricultural classes from the operation of laws which
bear heavily on other classes, and some of the claims and pretensions of
unionized labor, tend in precisely the same direction.

It is not restoration of privilege I have in mind but rather in a sense
the prevention of this through the existence of a class or estate that
has a fixed status dependent first on character and service and then on
an assured position that is not contingent on political favour, the bulk
of votes, or the acquisition of an inordinate amount of money. Surety of
position works towards independence of thought and action and towards
strong leadership. It establishes and maintains certain high ideals of
honour, chivalry, and service as well as of courtesy and manners. If the
things for which the gentlemen, the knighthood and the nobility of
Europe during the Christian dispensation were responsible were stricken
from the record there would be comparatively little left of the history
of European culture and civilization.

After all, is it merely sentimentalism and a sense of the picturesque
that leads us to look backward with some wistfulness to the days of
which the record is still left us in legends and fairy-tales and old
romance, when ignorance and vulgarity did not sit in high places even if
arrogance and pride and tyranny sometimes did, and when the profiteer
and the oriental financier and the successful politician did not
represent the distinction and the chivalry and the courtesy and the
honour of the social organism man builds for his own habitation? The
idea of knighthood still stirs us and the deeds of chivalry and the
courtesy and the honour of the social Knights of the Round Table,
Crusaders and knights errant, the quest of the Holy Grail, rescue and
adventure, the fighting with paynims and powers of evil, still stir our
blood and arouse in our minds strange contrasts and antinomies. Princes
and fair chatelaines in their wide domains with castle and chase and
delicate pleasaunce, liege-men bound to them by more than the feudal
ties of service. All the varied honours of nobility, vitalized by
significant ritual and symbolized by splendid and beautiful costumes.
Courts of Love and troubadours and trouvères, kings who were kings
indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their
courts--Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King
Charles--above all the simple rank and high honour of the "gentleman,"
the representative of a long line of honourable tradition, no casual and
purse-proud upstart, but of proud race and unquestioned status, proud
because it stood for certain high ideals of honour and chivalry and
loyalty, of courtesy and breeding and compassion. All these old things
of long ago still rouse in us answering humours, and there are a few of
us who can hardly see just why they are inconsistent with liberty and
opportunity, justice, righteousness and mercy.

Somehow the last two generations, and especially the last ten years,
have revealed many things hitherto hidden, and as we envisage society as
it has come to be, estimating it by new-found standards and establishing
new comparisons through a recovery of a more just historical sense, the
question comes whether it is indeed more wholesome, more beautiful, more
normal to man as he is, than the older society that in varying forms but
always the same principle, had held throughout all history until the new
model came in, now hardly a century ago.

I do not think this wistful and bewildered looking backward is
particularly due to a new desire for beauty, that comeliness of
condition that existed then and has now given place to gross ugliness
and ill-conditioned manners and ways. Rather it seems to me it is due to
a sense of irrationality and fundamental injustice in the present order,
coupled with a new terror of the proximate issue as this already is
revealing itself amongst many peoples. We resent the high estate,
purchasable and purchased, of the cynical intriguer and the vulgar
profiteer, of the tradesman in "big business," the cheap prophet and the
pathetic progeny of "successful men" fast reverting to type. We know our
city councils and our state legislatures and our houses of congress, we
know our newspapers, their standards and the motive powers behind them,
and what they record of the character and the doings of what they call
"society men and women." Above all we know that under the ancient
regime, in spite of manifold failures, shortcomings and disloyalty,
there was such a thing as a standard of honour, a principle of chivalry,
an impulse to unselfish service, a criterion of courtesy and good
manners; we look for these things now in vain, except amongst those
little enclaves of oblivion where the old character and old breeding
still maintain a fading existence, and as we consider what we have
become we sometimes wonder if the price we have paid for "democracy" was
not too extortionate.

Above all, we are tempted to this query when we think of our vanishing
standards of right and wrong, of our progressive reversal of values, of
our diminishing stock of social character. We tore down in indignant
revolt the rotten fabric of a bad social system when it had so far
declined from its ideal and its former estate that it could no longer be
endured, and we made a new thing, full as we were with the fire of
desire for a new righteousness and a new system that would compass it.
Perhaps we did well, at least we hardly could have done anything else;
but now we are again in the position of our forefathers who saw things
as they were and acted with force and decision. There are as many counts
against our society of plutocrats, politicians and proletarians, mingled
in complete and ineffective confusion, as there were against the
aristocracies, so called, of the eighteenth century. Perhaps there are
more, at least many of them are different, but the indictment is no less
sweeping.

Our plan, so generous, so liberal, so high-minded in many ways, has
failed to produce the results we desired, while it has worked itself out
to the point of menace. It is for us to see these facts clearly, and so
to act, and so promptly, that we may not have to await the destroying
force of cataclysm for the correction of our errors.




IV


THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM

The solution of the industrial and economic problem that now confronts
the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is
contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy
of work. Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the
earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its
performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer. In work
man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of
once arid ground, or whether it is the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey or
the Constitution of the United States, and so working he partakes
something of the divine power of creation.

When work is subject to slavery, all sense of its holiness is lost, both
by master and bondman; when it is subject to the factory system all the
joy in labour is lost. Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after
another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from
the intolerable conditions that have prevailed for more than a century;
they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results
unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and
creation given back to those who have been defrauded.

Before Christianity prevailed slavery was universal in civilized
communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and
this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism.
Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with
its small social units and its system of production for use not profits,
monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and
the Church with its progressive emancipation of the spiritual part of
man. Work was not easy, on the contrary it was very hard throughout the
Dark Ages and Mediaevalism, but there is no particular merit in easy
work. It was virtually free except for the labour and contributions in
kind exacted by the over-lord (less in proportion than taxes in money
have been at several times since) from the workers on the soil, and in
the crafts of every kind redeemed from undue arduousness by the joy that
comes from doing a thing well and producing something of beauty,
originality and technical perfection.

The period during which work possessed the most honourable status and
the joy in work was the greatest, extends from the beginnings of the
twelfth century well into the sixteenth. In some centuries, and along
certain lines of activity, it continued much longer, notably in England
and the United States, but social and industrial conditions were rapidly
changing, the old aristocracy was becoming perverted, Lutheranisms,
Calvinism and Puritanism were breaking down the old communal sense of
brotherhood so arduously built up during the Middle Ages, capitalism was
ousting the trade and craft guilds of free labour and political
absolutism was crushing ever lower and lower a proletariat that was fast
losing the last vestiges of old liberty. The fact of slavery without the
name was gradually imposed on the agricultural classes, and after the
suppression of the monasteries in England work as work lost its sacred
character and fell under contempt. With the outbreak of industrialism in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the institution and
introduction of "labour-saving" machinery and the consequent division of
labour, the factory system, the joint-stock company and capitalism, this
new slavery was extended to industrial workers, and with its
establishment disappeared the element of joy in labour.

For fifty years, about the blackest half-century civilization has had to
record, this condition of industrial slavery continued with little
amendment. Very slowly, however, the workers themselves, championed by
certain aristocrats like the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury against
professional Liberals like Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone in England,
began to loosen the shackles that bound them to infamous conditions, and
after the abrogation of laws that made any association of workingmen a
penal offense, the labour unions began to ameliorate certain of the
servile conditions under which for two generations the workman had
suffered. Since then the process of abolishing wage-slavery went slowly
forward until at last the war came not only to threaten its destruction
altogether but also to place the emancipated workers in a position where
they could dictate terms and conditions to capital, to employers, to
government and to the general public; while even now in many parts of
Europe and America, besides Russia, overt attempts are being made to
bring back the old slavery, only with the former bondsmen in supreme
dictatorship, the former employers and the "bourgeoisie" in the new
serfage.

The old slavery is gone, but the joy in work has not been restored;
instead, those who have achieved triumphant emancipation turn from
labour itself with the same distaste, yes, with greater aversion than
that which obtained under the old régime. With every added liberty and
exemption, with every shortening of hours and increase of pay,
production per hour falls off and the quality of the output declines.
What is the reason for this? Is it due to the viciousness of the worker,
to his natural selfishness, greed and cruelty? I do not think so, but
rather that the explanation is to be found in the fact that the
industrial system of modernism has resulted in a condition where the joy
has been altogether cut out of labour, and that until this state of
things has been reversed and the sense of the holiness of work and the
joy of working have been restored, it is useless to look for workable
solutions of the labour problem. The _fact_ of industrial slavery has
been done away with but the sense of the servile condition that attaches
to work has been retained, therefore the idea of the dignity and
holiness of labour has not come back any more than the old joy and
satisfaction. Failing this recovery, no reorganization of industrial
relations, neither profit-sharing nor shop committees, neither
nationalization nor state socialism, neither the abolition of capital,
nor Soviets nor syndicalism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat will
get us anywhere. It is all a waste of time, and, through its ultimate
failure and disappointments, an intensification of an industrial
disease.

Why is it that this is so? For an answer I must probe deep and, it may
seem, cut wildly. I believe it is because we have built up a system that
goes far outside the limits of human scale, transcends human capacity,
is forbidden by the laws and conditions of life, and must be abrogated
if it is not to destroy itself and civilization in the process.

What, precisely has taken place? Late in the eighteenth century two
things happened; the discovery of the potential inherent in coal and its
derivative, steam, with electricity yet unexploited but ready to hand,
and the application of this to industrial purposes, together with the
initiating of a long and astounding series of discoveries and inventions
all applicable to industrial purposes. With a sort of vertiginous
rapidity the whole industrial process was transformed from what it had
been during the period of recorded history; steam and machinery took the
place of brain and hand power directly applied, and a revolution greater
than any other was effected.

The new devices were hailed as "labour-saving" but they vastly increased
labour both in hours of work and in hands employed. Bulk production
through the factory system was inevitable, the result being an enormous
surplus over the normal and local demand. To organize and conduct these
processes of bulk-production required money greater in amount than
individuals could furnish; so grew up capitalism, the joint-stock
company, credit and cosmopolitan finance. To produce profits and
dividends markets must be found for the huge surplus product. This was
accomplished by stimulating the covetousness of people for things they
had not thought of, under normal conditions would not, in many cases,
need, and very likely would be happier without, and in "dumping" on
supposedly barbarous peoples in remote parts of the world, articles
alien to their traditions and their mode of life and generally
pestiferous in their influence and results. So came advertising in all
its branches, direct and indirect, from the newspaper and the bill-board
to the drummer, the diplomatic representative and the commercial
missionary.

Every year saw some new invention that increased the product per man,
the development of some new advertising device, the conquest of some new
territory or the delimitation of some new "sphere of influence," and the
revelation of some new possibility in the covetousness of man. Profits
rose to new heights and accumulating dividends clamoured for new
opportunities for investment. Competition tended to cut down returns,
therefore labour was more and more sustained through diminished wages
and laws that savagely prevented any concerted effort towards
self-defense. Improvements in agricultural processes and the application
of machinery and steam power, together with bulk-production and
scientific localization of crops, threw great quantities of
farm-labourers out of work and drove them into the industrial towns,
while advances in medical science and in sanitation raised the
proportion of births to deaths and soon provided a surplus of potential
labour so that the operation of the "law of supply and demand," extolled
by a new philosophy and enforced by the new "representative" or
democratic and parliamentary government, resulted in an unfailing supply
of cheap labour paid wages just beyond the limit of starvation.

At last there came evidences that the limit had been reached; the whole
world had been opened up and pre-empted, labour was beginning to demand
and even get more adequate wages, competition, once hailed as "the life
of trade" was becoming so fierce that dividends were dwindling.
Something had to be done and in self-defense industries began to
coalesce in enormous "trusts" and "combines" and monopolies.
Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became
international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and
ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naïveté
into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors
could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of
letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines,
expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern
newspaper possible, and ultimately developing the whole system of
propaganda which has now become the one great determining factor in the
making of public opinion.

When the twentieth century opened, that industrialism which had begun
just a century before, had, with its various collateral developments,
financial, educational, journalistic, etc., become not only the greatest
force in society, but as well a thing operating on the largest scale
that man had ever essayed: beside it the Roman Empire was parochial.

The result of this institution, conceived on such imperial lines, was,
in the field we are now considering, the total destruction of the sense
of the holiness of labour and of joy in work. It extended far beyond the
limits of pure industrialism; it moulded and controlled society in all
its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing
issues and wrecking man's powers of judgment. Until the war it seemed
irresistible, now its weakness and the fallacy of its assumptions are
revealed, but it has become so absolutely a part of our life, indeed of
our nature, that we are unable to estimate it by any sound standards of
judgment, and even when we approximate this we cannot think in other
terms when we try to devise our schemes of redemption. Even the
socialist and the Bolshevik think in imperial terms when they try to
compass the ending of imperialism.

Under this supreme system, as I see it, the two essential things I have
spoken of cannot be restored, nor could they maintain themselves if, by
some miracle, they were once re-established. The indictment cannot be
closed here. The actual condition that has developed from industrialism
presents certain factors that are not consonant with sane, wholesome and
Christian living. Not only has the unit of human scale in human society
been done away with, not only have the sense of the nobility of work and
joy in the doing been exterminated, but, as well, certain absolutely
false principles and methods have been adopted which are not susceptible
of reform but only of abolition.

Of some of these I have spoken already; the alarming drift towards
cities, until now in the United States more than one-half the population
is urban; the segregation of industries in certain cities and regions;
the minute division of labour and intensive specialization; the abnormal
growth of a true proletariat or non-land-holding class; the flooding of
the country by cheap labour drawn from the most backward communities and
from peoples of low race-value. Out of this has arisen a bitter class
conflict and the ominous beginnings of a perilous class consciousness,
with actual warfare joined in several countries, and threatened in all
others where industrial civilization is prevalent. With this has grown
up an artificially stimulated covetousness for a thousand futile
luxuries, and a standard of living that presupposes a thousand
non-essentials as basic necessities. Production for profit, not use,
excess production due to machinery, efficient organization, and surplus
of labour, together with the necessity for marketing the product at a
profit, have produced a state of things where at least one-half the
available labour in the country is engaged in the production and sale of
articles which are not necessary to physical, intellectual or spiritual
life, while of the remainder, hardly more than a half is employed in
production, the others are devoting themselves to distribution and to
the war of competition through advertising and the capturing of trade by
ingenious and capable salesmen. It is a significant fact that two of the
greatest industries in the United States are the making of automobiles
and moving pictures.

It is probably true to say that of the potential labour in the United
States, about one-fourth is producing those things which are physically,
intellectually and spiritually necessary; the remaining three-fourths
are essentially non-producers: they must, however, be housed, fed,
clothed, and amused, and the cost of this support is added to the cost
of the necessities of life. The reason for the present high cost of
living lies possibly here.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me say here that under the head of
necessities of life I do not mean a new model automobile each year,
moving pictures, mechanical substitutes for music or any other art, and
the thousand catch-trade devices that appear each year for the purpose
of filching business from another or establishing a new desire in the
already over-crowded imaginations of an over-stimulated populace.
Particularly do I not mean advertising in any sense in which it is now
understood and practised. If, as I believe to be the case, production
for profit, rather than for use, the reversal of the ancient doctrine
that the demand must produce the supply, in favour of the doctrine that
the supply must foster the demand, is the foundation of our economic
error and our industrial ills, then it follows that advertising as it is
now carried on by billboards, circulars and newspapers, by drummers,
solicitors and consular agents, falls in the same condemnation, for
except by its offices the system could not have succeeded or continue to
function. It is bad in itself as the support and strength of a bad
institution, but its guilt does not stop here. So plausible is it, so
essential to the very existence of the contemporary régime, so knit up
with all the commonest affairs of life, so powerful in its organization
and broad in its operations, it has poisoned, and continues to poison,
the minds of men so that the headlong process of losing all sense of
comparative values is accelerated, while every instinctive effort at
recovery and readjustment is nullified. How far this process has gone
may be illustrated by two instances. It is only a few months ago that a
most respected clergyman publicly declared that missionaries were the
greatest and most efficient asset to trade because they were unofficial
commercial agents who opened up new and savage countries to Western
commerce through advertising commodities of which the natives had never
heard, and arousing in them a sense of acquisitiveness that meant more
wealth and business for trade and manufacture, which should support
foreign missions on this ground at least. More recently the head of an
advertising concern in New York is reported to have said: "It is
principally through advertising that we have arrived at the high degree
of civilization which this age enjoys, for advertising has taught us the
use of books and how to furnish our homes with the thousand and one
comforts that add so materially to our physical and intellectual
well-being. The future of the world depends on advertising. Advertising
is the salvation of civilization, for civilization cannot outlive
advertising a century."

It is tempting to linger over such a delectable morsel as this, for even
if it is only the absurd and irresponsible output of one poor, foolish
man, it does express more or less what industrial civilization holds to
be true, though few would avow their faith so whole-heartedly. The
statement was made as propaganda, and propaganda is merely advertising
in its most insidious and dangerous form. The thing revealed its
possibilities during the war, but the black discredit that was then very
justly attached to it could not prevail against its manifest potency,
and it is now universally used after the most comprehensive and
frequently unscrupulous fashion, with results that can only be perilous
in the extreme. The type and calibre of mind that has now been released
from long bondage, and by weight of numbers is now fast taking over the
direction of affairs, is curiously subservient to the written word, and
lacking a true sense of comparative values, without effective leadership
either secular or religious, is easily swayed by every wind of doctrine.
The forces of evil that are ever in conflict with the forces of right
are notoriously ingenious in making the worse appear the better cause,
and with every desire for illumination and for following the right way,
the multitude, whether educated or illiterate, fall into the falsehoods
of others' imaginings. Money, efficiency, an acquired knowledge of mob
psychology, the printing press and the mail service acting in alliance,
and directed by fanatical or cynical energy, form a force of enormous
potency that is now being used effectively throughout society. It is
irresponsible, anonymous and pervasive. Through its operation the last
barriers are broken down between the leadership of character and the
leadership of craft, while all formal distinctions between the valuable
and the valueless are swept away.

I have spoken at some length of this particular element in the present
condition of things, because in both its aspects, as the support of our
present industrial and economic system and as the efficient moulder of a
fluid and unstable public opinion, it is perhaps the strongest and most
subtle force of which we must take account.

With a system so prevalent as imperial industry, so knit up with every
phase of life and thought, and so determining a factor in all our
concepts, united as it is with two such invincible allies as advertising
and propaganda, it is inconceivable that it should be overthrown by any
human force from without. Holding it to be essentially wrong, it seems
to me providential that it is already showing signs of falling by its
own weight. Production of commodities has far exceeded production of the
means of payment, and society is now running on promises to pay, on
paper obligations, on anticipations of future production and sale, on
credit, in a word. The war has enormously magnified this condition until
an enforced liquidation would mean bankruptcy for all the nations of the
earth, while the production of utilities is decreasing in proportion to
the production of luxuries, labour is exacting increasing pay for
decreasing hours of work and quality of output, and the enormous
financial structure, elaborately and ingeniously built up through
several generations, is in grave danger of immediate catastrophe. The
whole world is in the position of an insolvent debtor who is so deeply
involved that his creditors cannot afford to let him go into bankruptcy,
and so keep him out of the Poor Debtor's Court by doling out support
from day to day. Confidence is the only thing that keeps matters going;
what happens when this is lost is now being demonstrated in many parts
of Europe. The optimist claims that increased production, coupled with
enforced economy, will produce a satisfactory solution, but there is no
evidence that labour, now having the whip-hand, will give up its present
advantage sufficiently to make this possible; even if it did, payment
must be in the form of exchange or else in further promises to pay,
while the capacity of the world for consumption is limited somewhere,
though thus far "big business" has failed to recognize this fact. At
present the interest charges on debts, both public and private, have
reached a point where they come near to consuming all possible profits
even from a highly accelerated rate of production. Altogether it is
reasonable to assume that the present financial-industrial system is
near its term for reasons inherent in itself, let alone the possibility
of a further extension of the drastic and completely effective measures
of destruction that are characteristics of Bolshevism and its
blood-brothers.

Assuming that this is so, two questions arise: what is to take the place
of imperial industry, and how is this substitution to be brought about?

I think the answer to the first is: a social and industrial system based
on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply
follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more
or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should like to go into
this a little more in detail before trying to answer the second
question.

The normal social unit is a group of families predominantly of the same
race, territorially compact, of substantially the same ideals as
expressed in religion and the philosophy of life, and sufficiently
numerous to provide from within itself the major part of those things
which are necessary to physical, intellectual and spiritual well-being.
It should consist of a central nucleus of houses, each with its garden,
the churches, schools and public buildings that are requisite, the
manufactories and workshops that supply the needs of the community, the
shops for sale of those things not produced at home, and all necessary
places of amusement. Around this residential centre should be sufficient
agricultural land to furnish all the farm products that will be consumed
by the community itself. The nucleus of habitation and industry,
together with the surrounding farms, make up the social unit, which is
to the fullest possible degree, self-contained, self-sufficient and
self-governing.

Certain propositions are fundamental, and they are as follows: Every
family should own enough land to support itself at need. The farms
included in the unit must produce enough to meet the needs of the
population. Industry must be so organized that it will normally serve
the resident population along every feasible line. Only such things as
cannot be produced at home on account of climatic or soil limitations
should be imported from outside. All necessary professional services
should be obtainable within the community itself. All financial
transactions such as loans, credits, banking and insurance should be
domestic. Surplus products, whether agricultural, industrial or
professional, should be considered as by-products, and in no case should
the producing agency acquire such magnitude that home-consumption
becomes a side issue and production for profit take the place of
production for use.

All this is absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present
system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore
vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the
failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the
factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of
industries, is equally objectionable. To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be
slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured
product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a
great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000
miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles,
while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren;
to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool
and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the
greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second
and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that
it belongs in Gulliver's Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly
intelligent people. The only benefit is that which for a time accrued to
the railways, which carted raw materials and finished products back and
forth over thousands of miles of their lines, the costs of shipment and
reshipment being naturally added to the price to the consumer. The
penalties for this uneconomic procedure were borne by society at large,
not only in the increased costs but through the abnormal communities,
each with its tens of thousands of operatives all engaged in the same
work and generally drawn from foreign races (with the active
co-operation of the steamship lines), and the permanent dislocation of
the labour supply, together with the complete disruption of the social
synthesis.

With production for profit and segregation of industries has come an
almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a
right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The
dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as
possible each man should carry through one entire operation. This is of
course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization,
impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and
craftsmanship. The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done
away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is
only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made
to pay. Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is
reorganized on the basis of an infinite number of self-contained social
units, but in the ideal community--and I am dealing now with ideals--it
would not exist.

Allied with this is the whole question of the factory method and the use
and misuse of machinery. It seems to me that the true principle is that
machinery and the factory are admissible only when so employed they
actually do produce, in bulk operations, a better product, and with less
labour, than is possible through hand work. Weaving, forging and all
work where human action must be more or less mechanical, offer a fair
field for the machine and the factory, but wherever the human element
can enter, where personality and the skilled craft of the hand are given
play, the machine and the factory are inadmissible. The great city,
creation of "big business," segregation of industries, advertising,
salesmanship and a hundred other concomitants of modernism, have built
up an abnormal and avaricious demand for bulk-production along lines
where the handicraft should function. It becomes necessary--let us
say--to provide a million dollars worth of furniture for a ten million
dollar hotel (itself to be superseded and scrapped in perhaps ten years)
and naturally only the most intensive and efficient factory system can
meet this demand. Rightly, however, the furniture of a community should
be produced by the local cabinet makers, and so it should be in many
other industries now entirely taken over by the factory system.

For the future then we must consciously work for the building upward
from primary units, so completely reversing our present practice of
creating the big thing and fighting hopelessly to preserve such small
and few doles of liberty and personality as may be permitted to filter
downward from above. This is the only true democracy, and the thing we
call by the name is not this, largely because we have bent our best
energies to the building up of vast and imperial aggregates which have
inevitably assumed a complete unity in themselves and become dominating,
tyrannical and ruthless forces that have operated regardless of the
sound laws and wholesome principles of a right society. Neither the
vital democracy of principle nor the artificial democracy of practice
can exist in conjunction with imperialism, whether this is established
in government, in industry, in trade, in society or in education.

If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in
which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of
social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and
self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of
labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a
much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what
organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains? It
is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life
itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate
the consequent forms. If we can acquire a better standard of comparative
values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights
and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and
jealously preserving, or passionately regaining, the good, we shall be
able to establish certain broad, fundamental and governing principles,
and doing this we can await in confidence the evolution of the organic
forms that will be the working agencies of the new society.

I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society.
The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think,
follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages. They
will not be an archaeological restoration, as some of the English
protagonists of this great revolution seem to anticipate, they will be
variously adapted to the peculiar conditions of a new century, but the
basic principles will be preserved. Whatever happens, I am sure it will
not be either a continuation of the present system of capitalism and
profit-hunting, or nationalization of industries, or state socialism in
any form, or anything remotely resembling Bolshevism, syndicalism or a
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Here, as in government, education and
social relations, the power and the authority of the state must decline,
government itself withdrawing more and more from interference with the
operation of life, and liberty find its way back to the individual and
to the social and economic groups. We live now under a more tyrannical
and inquisitorial regime, in spite of (partly perhaps because of) its
democratic forms and dogmas, than is common in historical records.
Nationalization or state socialism would mean so great a magnifying of
this condition that existence would soon become both grotesque and
intolerable. We must realize, and soon, that man may lose even the last
semblance of liberty, as well under a nominal democracy as under a
nominal despotism or theocracy.

The guild system was the solution of the industrial problem offered and
enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed
the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if
conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern
institutions. "National guilds" is a contradiction in terms: it takes on
the same element of error that inheres in the idea of "one big union."
In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade
union, but it differed from it in more ways, and it seems to be true
that wherever this difference exists the guild was right and the union
is wrong. Community of fellowship and action amongst men of each craft
trade or calling is essential under any social system, good or bad, and
it would be inseparable from the better society that must sometime grow
up on the basis of the unit of human scale, for these autonomous groups,
in order to furnish substantially all that their component parts could
require, would have to be of considerable size as compared with the
little farming villages of New England, though in contrast with the
great cities of modernism they would be small indeed. In these new
"walled towns" there would be enough men engaged in agriculture, in the
necessary industrial occupations, in trade and in the professions to
form many guilds of workable size, and normally these guilds would
neither contain members of two or more professions or occupations, nor
those from outside the community itself. The guild cannot function under
intensive methods of production or where production is primarily for
profit, or where the factory system prevails, or where capitalism is the
established system, or under combinations, trusts or other devices for
the establishing and maintenance of great aggregates tending always
towards monopoly. However much we may admire the guild system and desire
its restoration, we may as well recognize this fact at once. The
imperial scale must go and the human scale be restored before the guild
can come back in any general sense.

I am assuming that this will happen, either through conscious action on
the part of the people or as the result of catastrophe that always
overtakes those who remain wedded to the illusions of falsity. On this
assumption what are these enduring principles that will control the
guild system of industry in the new State, however may be its form?

The answer is to be found in the old guilds, altars, shrines, vestments
and sacred vessels were given in incredible quantities for the
furnishing and embellishment of the chapel or church; funds also for the
maintenance of priestly offices especially dedicated to the guild.

Closely allied with the religious spirit was that of good-fellowship and
merrymaking. Every sort of feast and game and pageant was a part of the
guild system, as it was indeed of life generally at this time when men
did not have to depend upon hired professional purveyors of amusement
for their edification. What they wanted they did themselves, and this
community in worship and community in merrymaking did more even than the
merging of common material interests, to knit the whole body together
into a living organism.

In how far the old system can be revived and put into operation is a
question. Certainly it cannot be adopted as a fad and imposed on an
unwilling society as a clever archaeological restoration. It will have
to grow naturally out of life itself and along lines at present hardly
predicable. There are many evidences that just this spontaneous
generation is taking place. The guild system is being preached widely in
England where the defects of the present scheme are more obvious and the
resulting labour situation--or rather social situation--is more fraught
with danger than elsewhere, and already the restoration seems to have
made considerable headway. I am convinced, however, that the vital
aspects of the case are primarily due to the interior working of a new
spirit born of disillusionment and the undying fire in man that flames
always towards regeneration; what the ardent preaching of the
enthusiastic protagonists of the crusade best accomplishes is the
creation in the minds of those not directly associated with the movement
of a readiness to give sympathy and support to the actual accomplishment
when it manifests itself. Recently I have come in contact here in
America with several cases where the workmen themselves have broken away
from the old ways and have actually established what are to all intents
and purposes craft-guilds, without in the least realizing that they were
doing this.

I think the process is bound to continue, for the old order has broken
down and is so thoroughly discredited it can hardly be restored. If time
is granted us, great things must follow, but it is increasingly doubtful
if this necessary element of time can be counted on. Daily the situation
grows more menacing. Capital, which so long exploited labour to its own
fabulous profit, is not disposed to sit quiet while the fruits of its
labours and all prospects of future emoluments are being dissipated, and
it is hard at work striving to effect a "return to normalcy." In this it
is being unconsciously aided by the bulk of union labour which,
encouraged by the paramount position it achieved during the war,
influenced by an avarice it may well have learned from its former
masters, as narrow in its vision as they, and increasingly subservient
to a leadership which is frequently cynical and unscrupulous and always
of an order of character and intelligence which is tending to lower and
lower levels, is alienating sympathy and bringing unionism into
disrepute. In the United States the tendency is steadily towards a very
dangerous reactionism, with a corresponding strengthening of the radical
element which aims at revolution, and that impossible thing, a
proletarian dictatorship. It is this latter which is rampant and at
present unchecked in Europe, and this also is a constant menace to the
success of those sane and righteous movements which take their lead from
the guild system of the Middle Ages. A third danger, but one which is
constantly on the decline at present, partly because of the general
disrepute of governments and partly because of the enormous accessions
of power now accruing both to reactionism and radical revolutionism, or
"Bolshevism," is state socialism or nationalization, which leaves
untouched all the fatal elements in industrialism while it changes only
the agents of administration. The complete collapse of able and
constructive and righteous leadership, which is one of the startling
phenomena of modernism, has left uncontrolled the enormous energy that
has been released during the last three generations, and this is working
blindly but effectively towards a cataclysm so precipitate and
comprehensive that it is impossible not to fear that it may determine
long before the sober and informed elements in society have accomplished
very much in the recovery and establishment of sound and righteous
principles and methods.

Of course we can compass whichever result we will. We may shut our eyes
to the omens and let matters drift to disaster, or we may take thought
and council and avert the penalty that threatens us; the event is in our
own hands. It is as criminal to foresee and predict only catastrophe as
it is to compass this through lethargy, selfishness and illusion. We are
bound to believe that righteousness will prevail, even in our own time,
and believing this, what, in general terms will be the construction of
the new system that must take the place of industrialism?

I have already indicated what seem to me the fundamental ideas as: the
small social unit that is self-sustaining; production primarily for use,
coöperation in place of competition; a revived guild system with the
abolition of capitalism, exploitation and intensive specialization as we
now know these dominant factors in modern civilization. In the
application of these principles there are certain innovations that will,
I think, take place, and these may be listed somewhat as follows:

Land holding will become universal and the true proletariat or landless
class will disappear. It may be that the holding of land will become a
prerequisite to active citizenship. Industrial production being for use
not profit, the great city becomes a thing of the past, and life is
rendered simpler through the elimination of a thousand useless and
vicious luxuries; those employed in mechanical industries will be
incalculably fewer than now, while those that remain will give only a
portion of their time to industrial production, the remainder being
available for productive work on their own gardens and farms. The
handicrafts will be restored to their proper place and dignity, taking
over into creative labour large numbers of those who otherwise would be
sacrificed to the factory system. Where bulk production, as in weaving
and the preparation and manufacturing of metals, is economical and
unavoidable and carried on by factory methods, these manufactories will
probably be taken over by the several communities (not by the state as a
whole) and administered as public institutions for the benefit of the
community and under conditions and regulations which ensure justice and
well-being to the employees. All those in any community engaged in a
given occupation, as for example, building, will form one guild made up
of masters, journeymen and apprentices, with the same principles and
much the same methods as prevailed under the ancient guild system.
Fluctuating scales of prices determined by fluctuating conditions of
competition, supply and demand, and power of coercion, will give place
to "the fair price" fixed by concerted community action and revised from
time to time in order to preserve a right balance with the general scale
of cost of raw materials and cost of living. A maximum of returns in the
shape of profits or dividends will be fixed by law. The community itself
will undertake the furnishing of credits, loans and necessary capital
for the establishing of a new business, charging a small rate of
interest and maintaining a reserve fund to meet these operations.
Private banking, insurance and the loaning of money on collateral will
cease to exist.

I dare say this will all sound chimerical and irrational in the extreme;
I do not see it in that light. Its avowed object is the supersession of
"big business" in all its phases by something that comes down to human
scale. It aims to reduce labour and divide it more evenly by making the
great mass of non-producers--those engaged in distribution,
salesmanship, advertising, propaganda, and the furnishing of things
unnecessary to the bodily, intellectual and spiritual needs of
man--actual producers and self-supporting to a very large extent. It
aims at restoring to work some sense of the joy in creation through
active mind and hand. It aims at the elimination of the parasitic
element in society and of that dangerous factor which subsists on wealth
it acquires without earning, and by sheer force of its own opulence
dominates and degrades society. It does not strike at private ownership,
but rather exalts, extends and defends this, but it _does_ cut into all
the theories and practices of communism and socialism by establishing
the principle and practice of fellowship and coöperation. Is this
"chimerical and irrational"?

Meanwhile the "walled towns" do not exist and may not for generations.
"Big business" is indisposed to abrogate itself. Trade unionism is
fighting for its life and thereafter for world conquest, while the
enmity between capital and labour increases, with no evidence that a
restored guild system is even approximately ready to take its place.
Strikes and lockouts grow more and more numerous, and wider and more
menacing in their scope. The day of the "general strike" has only been
delayed at the eleventh hour in several countries, and a general strike,
if it can hold for a sufficient period, means, where-ever it occurs and
whenever it succeeds, the end of civilization and the loosing of the
floods of anarchy. There is hardly time for us patiently to await the
slow process of individual and corporate enlightenment or the
spontaneous development of the autonomous communities which, if they
were sufficient in number, would solve the problem through eliminating
the danger. What then, in the premises, can we do?

There are of course certain concrete things which might help, as for
instance the further extension and honest trying out of the "Kansas
plan" for regulating industrial relations; the forming of "consumers
leagues," and all possible support and furtherance of coöperative
efforts of every sort. There are further possibilities (perhaps hardly
probabilities) of controlling stock issues and stock holdings so that
dividends do not have to be paid on grossly inflated capitalization, and
fixing the maximum of dividends payable to non-active stockholders.
Equally desirable but equally improbable, is the raising of the level of
leadership in the labour unions so that these valuable institutions may
no longer stultify themselves and wreck their own cause by their unjust
and anti-social regulations as to apprentices, control of maximum output
and its standard of quality, division of labour with ironclad
inhibitions against one man doing another's work and against one man
doing what six men can do less well, and as to the obligation to strike
on order when no local or personal grievance exists. Most useful of all
would be a voluntary renunciation, on the part of the purchasing public,
of nine-tenths of the futile luxuries they now insanely demand, coupled
with the production by themselves of some of the commodities which are
easily producable; in other words, establishing some measure of
self-support and so releasing many men and women from the curse of
existence under factory conditions and giving them an opportunity of
living a normal life under self-supporting circumstances. This, coupled
with a fostering of the "back to the farm" movement, and the development
of conditions which would make this process more practicable and the
life more attractive, would do much, though in small ways, towards
producing a more wholesome and less threatening state of affairs.

Back of the whole problem, however, lies a fallacy in our conception of
existence that must be eliminated before even the most constructive
panaceas can possibly work. I mean the whole doctrine of natural rights
which has become the citadel of capitalism in all its most offensive
aspects, and of labour in its most insolent assumptions. The "rights" of
property, the "right" to strike, the "right" to collective bargaining,
the "right" to shut down an essential industry or to "walk out" and then
picket the place so that it may not be reopened, the "right" to vote and
hold office and do any fool thing you please so long as it is within the
law, these are applications of what I mean when I speak of a gross
fallacy that has come into being and has stultified our intelligence
while bringing near the wrecking of our whole system.

Neither man nor his community possesses any _absolute_ rights; they are
all conditioned on how they are exercised. If they are not so
conditioned they become privilege, which is a right not subject to
conditions, and privilege is one of the things republicanism and
democracy and every other effort towards human emancipation have set
themselves up to destroy. Even the "right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness" is conditioned by the manner of use, and the same
is true of every other and unspecified right. I do not propose to speak
here of more than one aspect of this self-evident truth, but the single
instance I cite is one that bears closely on the question of our
industrial and economic situation; it is the responsibility to society
of property or capital on the one hand and of labour on the other, when
both invoke their "rights" to justify them in oppressing the general
public in the pursuit of their own natural interests.

During the Middle Ages, just as the political theory maintained that
while a king ruled by divine right, this right gave him no authority to
govern wrong, so the social theory held that while a man had a right to
private property he had no right to use it against society, nor could
the labourer use his own rights to the injury of the same institution.
Power, property and labour must be used as a _function_, i.e., "an
activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose."
Unless I am mistaken, this is at the basis of our "common law."

As Mediaevalism gave place to the Renaissance this Christian idea was
abandoned, and increasingly the obligation was severed from the right,
which so became that odious thing, privilege. Intolerable in its
injustice and oppression, this privilege, which by the middle of the
eighteenth century had become the attribute of the aristocracy, was
completely overthrown, in France first of all, and a new doctrine of
rights was enunciated and put in operation. Unfortunately the result was
in essence simply a transforming of privilege from one body to another,
for the old conception of social purpose, as the necessary concomitant
of acknowledged rights, did not emerge from the shadows of the Middle
Ages; it had been too long forgotten. The new "rights" were exclusively
individualistic, in practice, though in the minds of the idealists who
formulated them, they had their social aspect. Their promulgation
synchronized with the sudden rise and violent expansion of
industrialism, and as one country after another followed the lead of
England in accepting the new system, they hardened into an iron-clad
scheme for the defence of property and the free action of the holders
and manipulators of property. Backed by the economic philosophy of
Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham and the Manchester School, generally, and the
evolutionary theories of the exponents of Darwinism, and abetted by an
endless series of statutes, the idea of the exemption of property
holders from any responsibility to society for the use of their
property, became a fixed part of the mental equipment of modernism.
Precisely the same thing happened politically and socially. Rights were
personal and implied no necessary obligation to society as a whole; they
were personal attributes and as such to be defended at all costs.

Now the result of this profound error as to the existence, nature and
limitation of these personal rights has meant simply the destruction of
a righteous and unified society which works by coöperation and
fellowship, and the substitution of individuals and corporate bodies who
work by competition, strife and mutual aggression towards the attainment
of all they can get under the impulse of what was once praised as
"enlightened self interest." In other words--war. The conflict that
began in 1914 was not a war hurled into the midst of a white peace, it
was only a military war arising in the centre of a far greater social
war, for there is no other word that is descriptive. Rights that are not
contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but
hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which
in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both
precedes and follows conflict.

The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice,
warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is
rampant--for a time--and warfare of one sort or another seems
inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but
hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is
its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is
synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to
its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its
turn. Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had
engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is
victorious. Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison,
while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were
involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees;
hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of
one social or industrial or economic or political institution for
another. This, above all else, is the disintegrating influence, and
against it no social organism, no civilization can stand. Unless it is
abrogated it means an ending of another epoch of human life, a period of
darkness and another beginning, some time after the poison has been
worked out by misery, adversity and forced repentance.

It is this prevalence of hatred, reinforced by avarice and perpetuated
by incessant warfare, that negatives all the efforts that are made
towards effecting a correspondence between the divided interests that
are the concomitant of industrialism. Strikes and lockouts, trades
unions and employers' associations as they are now constituted and as
they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian
dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence,
propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle
of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them. Nor is it enough to
work for the re-establishment of justice even by those methods of
righteousness, and with the impulse towards righteousness, which are so
different from those which are functioning at present along the lines of
contemporary industrial "reform." Justice is a "natural" virtue with a
real place in society, but the only saving force today is a supernatural
virtue. This, amongst other things, Christ brought into the world and
left as the saving force amongst the race He had redeemed and in the
society reconstituted in accordance with His will. This supernatural
virtue is Charity, sometimes expressed in the simpler form of Love, the
essence of the social code of Christianity and the symbol of the New
Dispensation as justice was the symbol of the Old. Just in so far as a
man or a cult or an interest or a corporation or a state or a generation
or a race, relinquishes charity as its controlling spirit, in so far it
relinquishes its place in Christian society and its claim to the
Christian name, while it is voided of all power for good or possibility
of continuance. Where charity is gone, intellectual capacity, effectual
power, and even justice itself become, not energies of good, but potent
contributions to evil. Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of
contemporary civilization? Does it manifest itself with power today in
the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest,
between nation and nation? If not, then we have forfeited the name of
Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its
enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once
consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an
acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution.

I am not charging any class or any interest or any people with exclusive
apostacy. In the end there is little to choose between one or another.
Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the
industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than
the nominal religionist. Nor am I charging conscious and willful
acceptance of wrong in the place of right. It is the institution itself,
industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and
derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to
condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery
be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined. Charity,
that is to say, fellowship, generosity, pity, self-sacrifice, chivalry,
all that is comprehended in the thing that Christ was, and preached, and
promulgated as the fundamental law of life, cannot come back to the
world so long as avarice, warfare and hate continue to exist, and
through Charity alone can we find the solution of the industrial and
economic problem that _must_ be solved under penalty of social death.




V


THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

In these essays, which look towards a new social synthesis, I find
myself involved in somewhat artificial subdivisions. Industrial, social
and political forces all react one upon another, and the complete social
product is the result of the interplay of these forces, coördinated and
vitalized by philosophy, education and religion. To isolate each factor
and consider it separately is apt to result in false values, but there
seems no other way in which the subject, which is essentially one, may
be divided into the definite parts which are consequent on the form of a
course of lectures. In considering now the political estate of the human
social organism it will be evident that I hold that this must be
contingent on many elements that reveal themselves in a contributory
industrial system, in the principles that are embodied in social
relationships, and in the general scheme of such a working philosophy of
life as may predominate amongst the component parts of the synthetic
society which is the product of all these varied energies and the
organic forms through which they operate.

Political organization has always been a powerful preoccupation of
mankind, and the earliest records testify to its antiquity. The
regulation of human intercourse, the delimiting of rights and
privileges, protection of life and property, the codifying of laws,
vague, various and conflicting, the making of new laws and the enforcing
of those that have taken organic form; all these and an hundred other
governmental functions, appeal strongly to the mind and touch closely on
personal interests. It is no wonder that the political history of human
society is the most varied, voluminous and popular in its appeal. At the
present moment this problem has, in general, an even more poignant
appeal, and no rival except the industrial problem, for in both cases
systems that, up to ten years ago, were questioned only by a minority
(large in the case of industry, small and obscure in the case of
government) have since completely broken down, and it is probable that a
political system which had existed throughout the greater part of Europe
and the Americas for a century and a half, almost without serious
criticism, has now as many assailants as industrialism itself.

The change is startling from the "Triumphant Democracy" period, a space
of time as clearly defined and as significant in its characteristics as
the "Victorian Era." Before the war, during the war, and throughout the
earlier years of the even more devastating "peace," the system which
followed the ruin of the Renaissance autocracies, the essential elements
in which were an ever-widening suffrage, parliamentary government, and
the universal operation of the quantitative standard of values, was
never questioned or criticised, except in matters of detail. That it was
the most perfect governmental scheme ever devised and that it must
continue forever, was held to be axiomatic, and with few exceptions the
remedy proposed for such faults as could not possibly escape detection
was a still further extension of the democratic principle. Even the war
itself was held to be "a war to make the world safe for democracy." It
is significant that the form in which this saying now frequently appears
is one in which the word "from" is substituted in place of the word
"for." It is useless to blink the fact that there is now a distrust of
parliamentary and representative government which is almost universal
and this distrust, which is becoming widespread, reaches from the
Bolshevism of Russia on the one hand, through many intermediate social
and intellectual stages, to the conservative elements in England and the
United States, and the fast-strengthening royalist "bloc" in France.

In many unexpected places there is visible a profound sense that
something is so fundamentally wrong that palliatives are useless and
some drastic reform is necessary, a reform that may almost amount to
revolution. Lord Bryce still believes in democracy in spite of his keen
realizations of its grievous defects, because, as he says, hope is an
inextinguishable quality of the human soul. Mr. Chesterton preaches
democracy in principle while condemning its mechanism and its workings
with his accustomed vigour; the Adamses renounce democracy and all its
works while offering no hint as to what could consistently take its
place with any better chance of success, while the royalists excoriate
it in unmeasured terms and preach an explicit return to monarchy.
Meanwhile international Bolshevism, hating the thing as violently as do
kings in exile, substitutes a crude and venal autocracy, while organized
labour, as a whole, works for the day when a "class-conscious
proletariat" will have taken matters into its own hands and established
a new aristocracy of privilege in which the present working classes will
hold the whip-hand. Meanwhile the more educated element of the general
public withdraws itself more and more from political affairs, going its
own way and making the best of a bad job it thinks itself taught by
experience it cannot mend.

It is useless to deny that government, in the character of its
personnel, the quality of its output, the standard of its service and
the degree of its beneficence has been steadily deteriorating during the
last century and has now reached, in nearly every civilized country, a
deplorably low level. Popular representatives are less and less men of
character and ability; legislation is absurd in quantity, short-sighted,
frivolous, inquisitorial, and in a large measure prompted by selfish
interests; administration is reckless, wasteful and inefficient, while
it is overloaded in numbers, without any particular aptitude on the part
of its members, and in a measure controlled by personal or corporate
interests. The whole system is in bad odour for it is shot through and
through with the greed for money and influence, while the cynicism of
the professional politician and the low average of character,
intelligence and manners of the strata of society that increasingly are
usurping all power, work towards producing that general contempt and
aversion that have become so evident of late and that are a menace to
society no less than that of the decaying institution itself.

Confronted by a situation such as this, the natural tendency of those
who suffer under it, either in their material interests or their ideals,
is to condemn the mechanism, perhaps even the very principles for the
operation of which the various machines were devised. Some reject the
whole scheme of representative, parliamentary government, and, failing
any plausible substitute, are driven back on some form of the soviet, or
even government by industrial groups. Those that go to the limit and
reject the whole scheme of democracy are in still worse plight for they
have no alternative to offer except a restored monarchy, and this, the
_terminus ad quem_ of their logic, their courage will not permit them to
avow.

It is a dilemma, but forced, I believe, by the fatal passion of the man
of modernism for the machine, the mechanical device, the material
equivalent for a thing that has no equivalent, and that is the personal
character of the constituents of society and the working factors in a
political organism. There was never a more foolish saying than that
which is so frequently and so boastfully used: "a government of laws and
not of men." This is the exact reversal of what should be recognized as
a self-evident truth, viz, that the quality of the men, not the nature
of the laws or of the administrative machine, is the determining factor
in government. You may take any form of government ever devised by man,
monarchy, aristocracy, republic, democracy, yes, or soviet, and if the
community in which this government operates has a working majority of
men of character, intelligence and spiritual energy, it will be a good
government, whereas if the working majority is deficient in these
characteristics, or if it makes itself negligible by abstention from
public affairs it will be a bad government. There is no one political
system which is right while all others are wrong. The monarchy of St.
Louis was better than the Third Republic, as this is better than was the
monarchy of Louis XV. The aristocracy of Washington was better than the
democracy of this year of grace, as this in itself is better than the
late junker aristocracy of Prussia. You cannot substitute a machine in
place of character, you cannot supersede life by a theory.

This does not mean that the form of government is of no moment, it is of
the utmost importance for I cannot too often insist that the organic
life of society is the resultant of two forces; spiritual energy working
through and upon the material forms towards their improvement or--when
this energy is weak or distorted--their degeneration; the material forms
acting as a stimulus towards the development of spiritual energy through
association and environment that are favourable, or towards its
weakening and distortion when these are deterrents because of their own
degraded or degrading nature. If it is futile to look for salvation
through the mechanism, it is equally futile to try to act directly and
exclusively on the character of the social constituents in the patient
hope that their defects may be remedied, and the preponderance of
character of high value achieved, before catastrophe overtakes the
experiment. Life is as sacramental as the Christian religion and
Christian philosophy; neither the spiritual substance nor the material
accidents can operate alone but only in a conjunction so intimate that
it is to all intents and purposes--that is, for the interests and
purposes of God in human life--a perfect unity. However completely and
even passionately we may realize the determining factor of spiritual
energy as this manifests itself through personal character, however
deeply we may distrust the machine, we are bound to recognize the
paramount necessity of the active interplay of both within the limits of
life as we know it on the earth, and therefore it is very much our
concern that the machine, whether it is industrial, political,
educational, ecclesiastical or social, is as perfect in its nature and
stimulating in its operations as we are able to compass.

In the present liquidation of values, theories and institutions we are
bound therefore to scrutinize each operating agency of human society, to
see wherein it has failed and how it can be bettered, and the problem
before us now is the political organism.

Now it appears that in the past there have been just two methods whereby
a civil polity has come into existence and established itself for a
short period or a long. These two methods are, first, unpremeditated and
sometimes unconscious growth; second, calculated and self-conscious
revolution. The first method has produced communities, states and
empires that frequently worked well and lasted for long periods; the
second has had issue in nothing that has endured for any length of time
or has left a record of beneficence. Evolution in government is in
accord with the processes of life, even to the extent that it is always
after a time followed by degeneration; revolution in government is the
throwing of a monkey-wrench into the machinery by a disaffected workman,
with the wrecking of the machine, the violent stoppage of the works, and
frequently the sudden death of the worker as a consequence. The English
monarchy from Duke William to Henry VIII, is a case of normal growth by
minor changes and modifications, but its subsequent history has been one
of revolutions, six or seven having occurred in the last four hundred
years; the scheme which now holds, though precariously, is the result of
the great democratic revolution accomplished during the reign of Queen
Victoria. The free monarchies of Europe which began to take form during
the long period of the Dark Ages and pursued their admirable course well
through the Middle Ages, were also normal and slow growths; but the
revolutions that have followed the Great War will meet a different fate,
several of them, indeed, have counted their existence in months and have
already passed into history.

If we are wise we shall discount revolutions for the future, for nothing
but ill is accomplished by denying life and exalting the ingenious
substitutes of ambitious and presumptuous Frankensteins; the result is
too often a monster that works cleverly at first, and with a semblance
of human intelligence, but in the end shows itself as a destroyer. Our
task is to envisage, as clearly as possible, the political systems
established amongst us, note their weaknesses either in themselves or in
their relationship to society as it is, and then try to find those
remedies that can be applied without any violent methods of dislocation
or substitution; always bearing in mind the fact that the energizing
force that will make them live, preserve them from deterioration, and
adapt them to conditions which will ever change, is the spiritual force
of human personality, and that this force comes only through the
character qualities of the individual components of society.

Now in considering our own case in this day and generation there are
first of all two matters to be borne in mind. One is that we shall do
well to confine our inquiry to the United States, for while the defects
we shall have to point out are common to practically all the
contemporary governments of Europe and the Americas, our own enginery is
different in certain ways, and our troubles are also different between
one example and another. After all, our immediate interest must lie with
our own national problems. The other point is that in criticising the
workings of government in America we are not necessarily criticising its
founders or the creators of its original constitutions, charters, and
other mechanisms. The Constitution of the United States, for example,
was conceived to meet one series of perfectly definite conditions that
have now been superseded by others which are radically, and even
diametrically different. The original Constitution was a most able
instrument of organic law, but just because it did fit so perfectly
conditions as they were four generations ago, it applies but
indifferently to present circumstances, and even less well than the
Founders hoped would be the case; for the reason that the amendments
which were provided for have seldom taken cognizance of these changing
conditions, and even when this was done the amendments themselves have
not been wisely drawn, while certain of them have been actually
disastrous in their nature, others frivolous, and yet more the result of
ephemeral and hysterical ebullitions of an engineered public opinion.
The same may be said of state constitutions and municipal charters,
which have suffered incessant changes, mostly unfortunate and
ill-judged, except during the last few years, when a spirit of real
wisdom and constructiveness has shown itself, though sporadically and as
yet with some timidity. The reforms, such as they are, are largely in
the line of palliatives; the deep-lying factors, those that control both
success and failure, are seldom touched upon. The necessary courage--or
perhaps temerity--is lacking. What is needed is such a clear seeing of
conditions, and such an approach, as manifested themselves in the
Constitutional Convention of the United States, for in spite of the many
compromises that were in the end necessary to placate a public opinion
not untouched by prejudice, superstition and selfishness, the great
document--and even more the records of the debates--still brilliantly
set forth both the clear-seeing and the lofty attitude that
characterized the Convention. Had these men been gathered together
today, even the same men, they would frame a very different document,
for they took conditions and men as they were, and, with an
indestructible hope to glorify their common sense, they produced a
masterpiece. It is in the same spirit that we must approach our problem
of today.

Now in considering the situation that confronts us, we find certain
respects in which either the methods are bad, or the results, or both.
There is no unanimity in this criticism, indeed I doubt if any two of us
would agree on all the items in the indictment, though we all might
unite on one or two. I can only give my own list for what it is worth.
In the first place we, in common with all the nations, have drifted into
imperialism of a gross scale and illiberal, even tyrannical working. We
could hardly do otherwise for such has been the universal tendency for
more than an hundred years. By constant progression municipal
governments have absorbed into themselves matters that in decency, and
with any regard for liberty, belong to the individual. Simultaneously
our state governments have followed the same course, infringing even on
the just prerogatives of the towns and cities, while, more than all, the
national government has robbed the states, the cities and the citizens
of what should belong to them, until at last we have an imperial,
autocratic, inquisitorial, and largely irresponsible government at
Washington that is the one supreme political fact; we are no longer a
Federal Republic but an Imperialism, in which is centralized all the
authority inherent in the one hundred and ten millions of our population
and from which a constantly diminishing stream of what is practically
devolved authority, trickles down through state and city to the
individual in the last instance--if it gets there at all! This I believe
to be absolutely and fatally wrong. In the first place, human society
cannot function at this abnormal scale, it is outside the human scale,
for in spite of our pride and insolence there are limits on every hand
to what man can do. In the second place, I conceive it to be absolutely
at variance with any principle of republicanism or democracy or even of
free monarchy. It is at one only with the imperialism of Egypt, Babylon,
Rome and the late Empire of Germany. In a free monarchy, a republic, or
a democracy, the pyramid of political organism stands, not on its point
but broad-based and four-square, tapering upward to its final apex. A
sane and wholesome society begins with the family--natural or
artificial--which has original jurisdiction over a far greater series of
rights and privileges than it now commands. From the family certain
powers are delegated to the next higher social unit, the village or
communal group, which in its turn concedes certain of its inherent
rights to the organic group of communities, or states, and finally the
states commit to the last and general authority, the national
government, some of the elements of authority that have been delegated
to them. The principle of this delegation from one organism to another,
is common interest and welfare; only those functions which can be
performed with more even justice and with greater effectiveness, by the
community for example, than by the family, are so delegated. In the same
way the several groups commit to their common government only so much as
they cannot perform with due justice and equity to the others in the
same group. In the end the national government exists only that it may
provide for a limited number of national necessities, as for example,
defence against extra-national aggression, the conduct of diplomatic
relations with foreign powers, the maintaining of a national currency
and a national postal service, the provision of courts of last resort,
and the raising of revenue for the support of these few and explicit
functions.

The first step, it seems to me, towards governmental reform, is
decentralization, with a return to the States, the civic communities and
the individual citizens of nine-tenths of the powers and the
prerogatives that have been taken from them in defiance of abstract
justice, of the principles of free government and of the theory of the
workable unit of human scale. In a word we must abandon imperialism and
all its works and go back to the Federal Republic.

The second cause of our troubles lies, I believe, in the institution of
universal suffrage founded on the theory (or dogma) that the electoral
franchise is an inalienable right. This doctrine is of recent invention,
only coming into force during the "reconstruction period" following the
War between the States, when it was brought forward by certain leaders
of the Republican party to justify their enfranchisement of the negroes
in the hope that by this act they could fix their party in power to
perpetuity. In any case, the plan itself has worked badly, both for the
community and for many of the voters. It is of course impossible for me
to argue the case in detail; I can do hardly more than state my own
personal belief, and this is that the question is wholly one of
expediency, and that the question of abstract justice and the rights of
man does not enter into the consideration. I submit that the electoral
franchise should again be accepted as a privilege involving a duty, and
not as a right inherent in every adult person of twenty-one years or
over and not lunatic or in jail. This privilege, which in itself should
confer honour, should be granted to those who demonstrate their capacity
to use it honestly and intelligently, and taken away for cause.

The acute critic will not be slow to remind me that this proposition is
somewhat beside the case and that it possesses but an academic interest,
since we are dealing with a _fait accompli._ This is of course perfectly
true. The electoral franchise could be so restricted only by the
suffrages of the present electorate, and it is inconceivable that any
large number, and far less, a majority, of voters would even consider
the proposition for a moment. For good or ill we have unrestricted adult
suffrage, and there is not the faintest chance of any other basis being
established by constitutional means. Something however can be done, and
this is a thing of great value and importance. What I suggest is
concerted effort towards a measured purification of the electorate
through the penalizing of law-breakers by temporary disfranchisement. It
is hardly too much to assume that a man who deliberately breaks the law
is constructively unfit to vote or to hold office, at all events,
conviction for any crime or misdemeanour gives a reasonable ground for
depriving the offender of these privileges, at least for a time. The
law-breaking element, whether it is millionaire or proletarian, is one
of the dangerous factors in society, which would lose nothing if from
time to time these gentry were removed from active participation in
public affairs. If, for example, any one convicted of minor offenses
punishable by fine or imprisonment were disfranchised for a year, if of
major offenses, for varying and increasing periods, from five years
upwards, and if a second offense during the period of disfranchisement
worked an automatic doubling of the time prescribed for a first offense,
I conceive that the electorate would be measurably purified and that
regard for the law would be stimulated. In one instance I am persuaded
that disfranchisement should be for life, and that is in the case of
giving or accepting a bribe or otherwise committing a crime against the
ballot; this, together with treason against the state, should be
sufficient cause for eliminating the offender from all further
participation in public affairs. If the electorate could be purified
after this fashion, and if more stringent laws could be passed in the
matter of naturalization of aliens, together with iron-clad requirements
that every voter should be able to speak, read and write the English
language, we should have achieved something towards the safeguarding of
the suffrage.

The third weakness in our system, and in some respect the most
dangerous, as it is in all respects the most pestiferous, is the
insanity of law-making. All parliamentary governments suffer from this
malady, but that of the United States most grievously, and this is true
of the national government, the states and the municipalities. It has
become the conviction of legislative bodies that they must justify their
existence by making laws, and the more laws they pass the better they
have discharged their duties. The thing has become a scandal and an
oppression, for the liberties of American citizens and the just
prerogatives of the states and the cities, as vital human groups, have
been more infringed upon, reduced, and degraded by free legislation than
ever happened in similar communities by the action of absolute monarchs.
It is a folly that works its insidious injury in two ways; first by
confusing life by innumerable laws ill-advised, ill-drawn, mutually
contradictory, ephemeral in their nature, inquisitorial in their
workings; second, by creating a condition where any personal or factious
interest can be served by due process of law, until at last we have
reached a point where liberty itself has largely ceased to exist and we
find ourselves crushed under a tyranny of popular government no less
oppressive than the tyranny of absolutism. Nor is this all; the mania
for making laws has bred a complete and ingenious and singularly
effective system of getting laws made by methods familiar to the members
of all legislative bodies whether they are city councils, state
legislatures or the national congress, and this means opportunities for
corruption, and methods of corruption, that are fast degrading
government in the United States to a point where there is none so poor
as to do it reverence. The whole system is preposterous and absurd,
breeding not only bad laws, but a widespread contempt of law, while the
personal freedom for which democracy once fought, is fast becoming a
memory.

The trouble began as a result of one of the elements in the American
Constitution which was the product not of the sound common sense and the
lofty judgment of the framers, but of a weak yielding to one of the
doctrinaire fads of the time that had no relationship to life but was
the invention of political theorists, and that was the unnatural
separation of the executive, legislative and judicial functions of
government. The error has worked far and the superstition still holds.
What is needed is an initiative in legislation, centred in one
responsible head or group, that, while functioning in all normal and
necessary legislative directions, still allows individual initiative on
the part of the legislators, as a supplementary, or corrective, or
protective agency. No government functions well in fiscal matters
without a budget: what we need in legislative matters is a legislative
budget, and by this phrase, I mean that the primary agency for the
proposing of laws should be the chief executive of a city, or state or
the nation, with the advice and consent of his heads of departments who
would form his cabinet or council.

Under this plan the Governor and Council, for example, would at the
opening of each legislative session present a programme or agenda of
such laws as they believed the conditions to demand, and in the shape of
bills accurately drawn by the proper law officer of the government. No
such "government" bill could be referred to committee but must be
discussed in open session, and until the bills so offered had been
passed or refused, no private bill could be introduced. A procedure such
as this would certainly reduce the flood of private bills to reasonable
dimensions while it would insure a degree of responsibility now utterly
lacking. There is now no way in which the author of a foolish or
dangerous bill which has been enacted into law by a majority of the
legislature, can be held to account and due responsibility imposed upon
him, but the case would be very different if a mayor, a governor or the
President of the United States made himself responsible for a law or a
series of laws, by offering them for action in his own name. Certainly
if this method were followed we should be preserved in great measure
from the hasty, confused and frivolous legislation that at present makes
up the major part of the output of our various legislative bodies. One
of the greatest gains would be the reduction of the annual grist to a
size where each act could be considered and debated at sufficient length
to guarantee as reasonable a conclusion as would be possible to the
members of the legislative body. The deplorable device of instituting
committees, to each of which certain bunches of bills are referred
before they are permitted to come before the house, would be no longer
necessary. This system, which became necessary in order to deal with the
enormous mass of undigested matter which has overwhelmed every
legislature as a result of the present chaotic and irresponsible
procedure, is perhaps both the most undemocratic device ever put in
practice by a democracy, and the most fruitful of venality, corruption
and injustice. It is unnecessary to labour this point for everyone knows
its grave evils, but there seems no way to get rid of it unless some
curb is placed on the number of bills introduced in any session. The
British Parliament is not necessarily a model of intelligent or capable
procedure, but where in one session at Westminster no more than four
hundred bills were introduced, at Washington, for the same period, the
count ran well over twelve thousand! Manifestly some committee system is
inevitable under conditions such as this, but under the committee system
free government and honest legislation are difficult of attainment.

One would not of course prevent the proposal of a bill by any member of
the legislature, indeed this free action would be absolutely necessary
as a measure of protection against executive oppression, but this should
be prohibited until after the government programme had been disposed of.
After that task was accomplished the legislature might sit indefinitely,
or as long as the public would stand it, for the purpose of considering
private bills, and these could be referred to committees as at present.
The chances are, however, that the government programme would cover the
most essential matters and what would remain would be the edifying
spectacle of Solons solemnly considering such questions as the minimum
length of sheets on hotel beds, the limitation in inches and fractions,
of the heels of women's shoes, the amount of flesh that could be legally
exposed by a bathing suit, or the pensioning of a Swedish Assistant
Janitor,--all of which are the substance of actual bills introduced in
various State legislatures during the session last closed.

Another grave weakness in our system is the election by popular vote of
many judicial and administrative officers, coupled with the vigorous
remnants of the old and degrading "spoils system" whereby many thousands
of strictly non-political offices are almost automatically vacated after
any partisan victory. I cannot trust myself to speak of the infamy of an
elective judiciary; fortunately I live in a state where this worst abuse
of democratic practice does not exist, and so it touches me only in so
far as it offends the sense of decency and justice. In the other cases
it is only a question of efficient and intelligent administration. There
is an argument for electing the chief executive of a city, a state or
the nation, by popular vote, and the same holds in the case of the lower
house of the legislature where a bi-cameral system exists, but there is
no argument for the popular election of the administrative officers of a
state. There is even less,--if there can be less than nothing--for the
changes in personnel that take place after every election. Civil service
reform has done a world of good, but as yet it has not gone far enough
in some directions, while its mechanism of examinations is defective in
principle in that it leaves out the personal equation and establishes
its tests only along a very few of the many lines that actually exist. I
would offer it as a proposition that no election should in itself affect
the status of any man except the man elected, and, in the case of a
mayor or governor or the President, those who are directly responsible
to him and to his administration for carrying out his policies; and
further, that the voter, when he votes, should vote once and for one man
in his city, once and for one man in his state, and once and for one man
in the nation, and that man, in each case, should be his representative
in the lower branch of the legislative body. Choosing administrative
officials by majority vote, and the election of judges for short terms
by the same method, are absurdities of a system fast falling into chaos.
The maintenance of a bi-cameral legislative organization, with the
choosing of the members of both houses by the same electorate is in the
same class, a perfectly irrational anomaly which violates the first
principles of logic and leads only to legislative incompetence, and
worse. The referendum is of precisely the same nature, but this already
has become a _reductio ad absurdum,_ and can hardly survive the
discredit into which it has fallen. In any reorganization of government
looking towards better results, these elements must disappear.

As a matter of fact, government has come to occupy altogether too large
a place in our consciousness; naturally, for it has come to a point
where it pursues us--and overtakes us--at every turn. Democracies always
govern too much, that is one of their great weaknesses. Elections,
law-making, and getting and holding office, have become an obsession and
they shadow our days. So insistent and incessant are the demands, so
artificial and unreal the issues, so barren of vital results all this
pandemonium of partisanship and change, the more intelligent and
scrupulous are losing interest in the whole affair, and while they
increasingly withdraw to matters of a greater degree of reality those
who subsist on the proceeds gain the power, and hold it. At the very
moment when the women of the United States have been given the vote,
there are many men (and women also) who begin to think that the vote is
a very empty institution and in itself practically void of power to
effect anything of really vital moment. I am not now defending this
position, I only assert that it exists, and I believe it is due to the
degradation of government through the very modifications and
transformations that have been effected, since the time of Andrew
Jackson, in a perfectly honest attempt at improvement.

The best government is that which does the least, which leaves local
matters in the hands of localities, and personal matters in the hands of
persons, and which is modestly inconspicuous. Good government
establishes, or recognizes, conditions which are stable, reliable, and
that may be counted on for more than two years, or four years, at a
time. It has continuity, it preserves tradition, and it follows custom
and common law. Such a government is neither hectic in its vicissitudes
nor inquisitorial in its enactments. It is cautious in its expenditures,
efficient in its administration, proud in maintaining its standards of
honour, justice and "noblesse oblige." Good government is august and
handsome; it surrounds itself with dignity and ceremony, even at times
with splendour and pageantry, for these things are signs of self-respect
and the outward showing of high ideals--or may be made so; that is what
good manners and ceremony and beauty are for. Finally, good government
is where the laws of Christian morals and courtesy and charity that are
supposed to hold between Christian men hold equally, even more
forcefully, in public relations both domestic and foreign. Where
government of this nature exists, whether the form is monarchical,
republican or democratic, there is liberty; where these conditions do
not obtain the form matters not at all, for there is a servile state.

At the risk of being tedious I will try to sketch the rough outlines of
what, in substance, I believe to be that form of civil polity which,
based on what now exists, changes only along lines that would perhaps
tend towards establishing and maintaining those ideals of liberty, order
and justice which have always been the common aim of those who have
striven to reform a condition of things where they were attained
indifferently or not at all.

The primary and effective social and political unit is the "vill" or
commune; that is to say, a group of families and individuals living in
one neighbourhood, and of a size that would permit all the members to
know one another if they wished to do so, and also the coming together
of all those holding the electoral franchise, for common discussion and
action. The average American country town, uninvaded by industrialism,
is the natural type, for here the "town meeting" of our forefathers is
practicable, and this remains the everlasting frame and model of
self-government. In the case of a city the primary unit would be of
approximately the same size, and the entire municipality would be
divided into wards each containing, say, about five hundred voters.
These primary units would possess a real unity and a very large measure
of autonomy, but they would be federated for certain common purposes
which would vary in number and importance in proportion to the closeness
of their common interests, from the county, made up of a number of small
villages, to the city which would comprise as many wards as might be
numerically necessary, and whose central government would administer a
great many more affairs than would the county. The city would be in
effect a federation of the wards or boroughs.

The individual voter would exercise his electoral franchise and perform
his political duties only within the primary unit (the township or ward)
where he had legal residence. At an annual "town meeting" he would vote
for the "selectmen" or the ward council who would have in charge the
local interests of the primary unit, which would be comprehensive in the
case of a township, necessarily more limited in the case of a ward.
These local boards would elect their own chairmen who would also form
the legislative body of the county or the municipality. At the same town
meeting the voter would cast his ballot for a representative in the
lower legislative body of the state. In the smaller commonwealths each
township or ward would elect its own representative, but in states of
excessive population representation would have to be on the basis of
counties and municipalities, for no legislative body should contain more
than a very few hundred members. Nominations in the town meeting should
be _viva voce,_ elections by secret ballot. Legislation should be
primarily on the initiative of the selectmen or ward council, and voting
should be _viva voce._ With the exercise of his privilege of speaking
and voting at the meetings of his primary unit, the direct political
action of the citizen would cease.

The secondary unit would be the county or the city. Here the legislative
body would consist of the presiding officers of the township or ward
governments. The sheriff of a county or the mayor of a city would be
chosen by these legislative bodies from their own number and should hold
office for a term of several years, while the local governments, and
therefore the legislative bodies of the county or the city, would be
chosen annually. The chief executive of a county or city would appoint
all heads of departments who would form his advisory council, and he
would also frame and submit annually both a fiscal and a legislative
budget.

The tertiary unit is the state, which is a federation of the counties
and cities forming some one of the historic divisions of the United
States. The legislature would as now be composed of two chambers, one
made up of representatives of the primary units, holding office for a
brief term, and a second representing the secondary units and chosen by
their governing bodies for a long term. The logic of a bi-cameral system
demands that the lower house should represent the changing will of the
people, the upper, in so far as possible, its cumulative wisdom and the
continuity of tradition, while, as already stated, the whole principle
is vitiated if both houses are chosen by the same electorate. The chief
executive should be chosen by the legislative chambers in joint session,
from a panel made up of their own membership and the heads of the county
and city governments. He should hold office for a long term, preferably
for an indeterminate period contingent on "good behaviour." In this case
his cabinet, or council of the heads of departments, would of course be
responsible to the legislature and would resign on a formal vote of
censure or "lack of confidence." The Governor would have the same power
of appointment, and the same authority to present fiscal and legislative
budgets as, already specified in the case of a mayor of a city. No
"commissions," unpaid or otherwise, should be permitted, all the
administrative functions of government being performed by the various
departments and their subordinate bureaux.

The national government is the final social and political unit, though
it is conceivable that with a territory and population as great and
diversified as that of the United States, and bearing in mind the great
discrepancy in size between the states, something might be gained by the
institution of a system of provinces, some five or six in all, made up
of states grouped in accordance with their general community of
interests, as for example, all New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey and Delaware; the states of the old Confederacy, those of the
Pacific Coast, and so on. The point need not be pressed here, but there
are considerations in its favour. In any case the nation as a whole is
the final federal unit. Here the lower legislative house would consist
of not more than four hundred members, allocated on a basis of
population and elected by the representative bodies of the primary units
(the townships and city wards) as already described. The members of the
upper house would be elected by the legislative bodies of the several
states on nomination by the Governor. The chief executive of the nation
would be chosen by the two legislative bodies, in joint session, from
amongst the then governors of the several states. He should certainly
hold office for "good behaviour," and his cabinet would be responsible
to the legislature as provided for in the case of the state governments.

I do not offer this programme with any pride of paternity; probably it
would not work very well, but it could hardly prove less efficacious
than our present system under conditions as they have come to be. This
cannot continue indefinitely, for it is so hopelessly defective that it
is bound to bring about its own ruin, with the probable substitution of
some doctrinaire device engendered by the natural revolt against an
intolerable abuse. If only we could see conditions clearly and estimate
them at something approaching their real value, we should rapidly
develop a constructive public opinion that, even though it represented a
minority, might by the very force behind it compel the majority to
acquiesce in a radical reformation. Unfortunately we do not do this, we
are hypnotized by phrases and deluded by vain theories, as Mr.
Chesterton says:

"So drugged and deadened is the public mind by the conventional public
utterances, so accustomed have we grown to public men talking this sort
of pompous nonsense and no other, that we are sometimes quite shocked by
the revelation of what men really think, or else of what they really
say."

We do, now and then, confess that legislation is as a whole foolish,
frivolous and opportunist; that administration is wasteful, incompetent
and frequently venal; that the governmental personnel, legislative,
administrative and executive, is of a low order in point of character,
intelligence and culture--and tending lower each day. We admit this, for
the evidence is so conspicuous that to deny it would be hypocrisy, but
something holds us back from recognizing the nexus between effect and
cause. Unrestricted immigration, universal suffrage, rotation in office,
the subjection of many offices and measures to popular vote, the
parliamentary system, government by political parties--all these customs
and habits into which we have fallen have arrived at failure which
presages disaster. They have failed because the character of the people
that functioned through these various engines had failed, diluted by the
low mentality and character-content of millions of immigrants and their
offspring, degraded by the false values and vicious standards imposed by
industrial civilization, foot-loose from all binding and control of a
vital and potent religious impulse or religious organism.

It is the old, vicious circle; spiritual energy declines or is diverted
into wrong channels; thereupon the physical forms, social, industrial,
political, slip a degree or two lower out of sympathy with the failing
energy, and these in their turn exert a degrading influence on the
waning spiritual force, which declines still further only to be pulled
lower still by the material agencies which continue their progressive
declension. Theories, no matter how high-minded and altruistic, cannot
stand before a condition such as this, for self-protection decrees
otherwise even if the higher motive of doing right things and getting
right things just because they _are_ right, does not come into effective
operation. The evil results of the institutions I have catalogued above
are not to be denied, and the institutions themselves must be reformed
or altogether abandoned, in the face of the loud-mouthed exhortations of
those who now make them their means of livelihood, and even at the
expense of the honest upholders of theories and doctrines that do credit
to their humanitarianism but have been weighed and found wanting.

I am anxious not to put this plan for the reform, in root and branch, of
our political institutions, on the low level of mere caution and
self-defense. The motive power of this is fear, and fear is only second
to hate in its present position as a controlling force in society. We
should have good government not because it is economical and ensures
what are known as "good business conditions," and promises a peaceful
continuance of society, but because it is as worthy an object of
creative endeavour as noble art or a great literature or a just and
merciful economic system, or a life that is full of joy and beauty and
wholesome labour. The political organism is in a sense the microcosm of
life itself, and it should be society lifted up to a level of dignity,
majesty and nobility. The doctrine that in a democracy the government
must exactly express the numerical preponderance in the social
synthesis, and that, if this happens to be ignorant, mannerless and
corrupt, then the government must be after the same fashion, is a low
and a cowardly doctrine. Government should be better than the majority;
better than the minority if this has advantage over the other. It should
be of the best that man can compass, resting above him as in some sort
an ideal; the visible expression of his better self, and the better self
of the society of which he is a part. If a political system, any
political system, produces any other result; if it has issue in a
representation of the lowest and basest in society, or even of the
general average, then it is a bad system and it must be redeemed or it
will bring an end that is couched in terms of catastrophe.

Reform is difficult, perhaps even impossible of attainment under the
existing system where universal, unlimited suffrage and the party system
are firmly intrenched as opponents of vital reform, and where
representation and legislation take their indelible colour from these
unfortunate institutions. It must freely be admitted that there is no
chance of eliminating or recasting either one or the other by the
recognized methods of platform support and mass action through the
ballot. It comes in the end to a change of viewpoint and of heart on the
part of the individual. No party, no political leader would for a moment
endorse any one of the principles or methods I have suggested, for this
would be a suicidal act. The newspaper, irresponsible, anonymous,
directed by its advertizing interests or by those more sinister still,
yet for all that the factor that controls the opinions of those who hold
the balance of power in the community as it is now constituted, would
reject them with derision, while in themselves they are radically
opposed to the personal interests of the majority. The only hope of
lifting government to the level of dignity and capacity it should hold,
lies in the individual. It is necessary that we should see things
clearly, estimate conditions as they are, and think through to the end.
We do not do this. We admit, in a dull sort of way, that matters are not
as they should be, that legislation is generally silly and oppressive,
that taxation is excessive, that administration is wasteful and reckless
and incompetent, for we know these things by experience. We accept them,
however, with our national good-nature and easy tolerance, assuming that
they are inseparable from democratic government--as indeed they are, but
not for a moment does any large number think of questioning the
principle, or even the system, that must take the responsibility. When
disgust and indifference reach a certain point we stop voting, that is
all. At the last presidential election less than one half the qualified
voters took the trouble to cast their ballots, while in Boston (which is
no exception) it generally happens that at a municipal elections the
ballots cast are less than one-third the total electorate. I wonder how
many there are here today who have ever been to a ward meeting, or have
sat through a legislative session of a city government, as of Boston for
example, or have listened to the debates in a state house of
representatives, or analyzed the annual grist of legislative bills, or
have sat for an hour or two in the Senate or House at Washington. Such
an experience is, I assure you, illuminating, for it shows exactly why
popular government is what it is, while it forms an admirable basis for
a constructive revision of judgment as to the soundness of accepted
principles and the validity of accepted methods.

Our political attitude today is based on an inherited and automatic
acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae. We neither see
things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition
through to the end: we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan "slogans"
and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous. Let us
see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no
matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be. Is there
any one who would confess that character and intelligence are now a
helpless minority in this nation? Such an admission would be almost
constructive treason. The instinct of the majority is right, but it is
defective in will and it is subservient to base leadership, while its
power for good is negatived by the persistence of a mass of formulae
that, under radically changed conditions, have ceased to be beneficient,
or even true, and have become a clog and a stumbling block.

I may not have indicated better ideals or sounder methods of operation,
but the true ideals exist and it is not beyond our ability to discover a
better working system. Partisanship cannot reveal either one or the
other, nor are they the fruit of organization or the attribute of
political leadership. They belong to the common citizen, to you, to the
individual, and if once superstition is cast out and we fall back on
right reason and the eternal principles of the Christian ethic and the
Christian ideal, we shall not find them difficult of attainment; and
once attained they can be put in practice, for the ill thing exists only
on sufferance, the right thing establishes itself by force of its very
quality of right.




VI


THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART

When, as on occasion happens, some hostile criticism is leveled against
the civilization of modernism, or against some one of its many details,
the reply is ready, and the faultfinder is told that the defect, if it
exists, will in the end be obviated by the processes of popular
education. Pressed for more explicit details as to just what may be the
nature of this omnipotent and sovereign "education," the many champions
give various answer, depending more or less on the point of view and the
peculiar predilections of each, but the general principles are the same.
Education, they say, consist of two things; the formal practice and
training of the schools, and the experience that comes through the use
of certain public rights and privileges, such as the ballot, the holding
of office, service on juries, and through various experiences of the
practice of life, as the reading of newspapers (and perhaps books), the
activities of work, business and the professions, and personal
association with other men in social, craft, and professional clubs and
other organizations.

With the second category of education through experience we need not
deal at this time; it is a question by itself and of no mean quality;
the matter I would consider is the more formal and narrow one of
scholastic training in so far as it bears on the Great Peace that,
though perhaps after many days, must follow the Great War and the little
peace.

Answering along this line, the protagonists of salvation through
education pretty well agree that the thing itself means the widest
possible extension of our public school system, with free state
universities and technical schools, and the extension of the educational
period, with laws so rigid, and enforcement so pervasive and impartial,
that no child between the ages of six and sixteen can possibly escape.
This free, compulsory and universal education is assumed to be
scrupulously secular and hedged about with every safeguard against the
insidious encroachments of religion; it will aim to give a little
training in most of the sciences, and much in the practical necessities
of business life, as for example, stenography, book-keeping, advertising
and business science; it will cover a broad field of manual training
leading to "graduate courses" in special technical schools; the
"laboratory method" and "field practice" will be increasingly developed
and applied; Latin, Greek, logic and ancient history will be minimized
or done away with altogether, and modern languages, applied psychology
and contemporary history will be correspondingly emphasized. As for the
state university, it will allow the widest range of free electives, and
as an university it will aim to comprise within itself every possible
department of practical activity, such as business administration,
journalism, banking and finance, foreign trade, political science,
psycho-analysis, mining, sanitary engineering, veterinary surgery, as
well as law, medicine, agriculture, and civil and mechanical
engineering. I am curious to inquire at this time if education such as
this does, as a matter of fact, educate, and how far it my be relied
upon as a corrective for present defects in society; or rather, first of
all, whether education of this, or of any sort, may be looked on as a
sufficient saving force, and whether general education, instead of being
extended should not be curtailed, or rather safeguarded and restricted.

I have already tried to indicate, in my lecture on the Social Organism,
certain doubts that are now arising as to the prophylactic and
regenerative powers of education, whether this is based on the old
foundation of the Trivium and Quadrivium under the supreme dominion of
Theology, or on the new foundation of utilitarianism and applied science
under the dominion of scientific pedagogy. While the active-minded
portion of society believed ardently in progressive evolution, in the
sufficiency of the intellect, the inerrancy of the scientific method,
and the transmission by inheritance of acquired characteristics, this
supreme confidence in free, secular, compulsory education as the
cure-all of the profuse and pervasive ills of society was not only
natural but inevitable. I submit that experience has measurably modified
the situation, and that we are bound therefore to reconsider our earlier
persuasions in the light of somewhat revealing events.

We may admit that the system of modern education works measurably well
so far as intellectual training is concerned; _training_ as
distinguished from development. It works measurably well also in
preparing youth for participation in the life of applied science and for
making money in business and finance. Conscientious hard labour has been
given, and is being given, to making it more effective along these
lines, and almost every year some new scheme is brought forward
enthusiastically, tried out painstakingly, and then cast aside
ignominiously for some new and even more ingenious device. The amount of
education is enormous; the total of money spent on new foundations,
courses, buildings, equipment--on everything but the pay of the
teachers--is princely; the devotion of the teachers, themselves, in the
face of inadequate wages, is exemplary, and yet, somehow the results are
disappointing. The truth is, the development of _character_ is not in
proportion to the development of public and private education. The moral
standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in
business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of
value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and
wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty,
service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling
motive, or at least the conscious aspiration, of active men.

This is not to say that these do not exist; the period that has seen the
retrogression has recorded also a reaction, and there are now perhaps
more who are fired by the ardent passion for active righteousness, than
for several generations, but the average is lower, for where, many times
in the past, there has been a broad, general average of decency, now the
disparity is great between the motives that drive society as a whole,
and its methods of operation, and the remnant that finds itself an
unimportant minority. Newspapers are perhaps hardly a fair criterion of
the moral status of a people--or of anything else for that matter--but
what they record, and the way they do it, is at least an indication of a
condition, and after every possible allowance has been made, what they
record is a very alarming standard of public and private morality, both
in the happenings themselves and in the fashion of their publicity.

No one would claim that the responsibility for this weakening of moral
standards rests predominantly on the shoulders of the educational system
of today; the causes lie far deeper than this, but the point I wish to
make is that the process has not been arrested by education, in spite of
its prevalence, and that therefore it is unwise to continue our
exclusive faith in its remedial offices. The faith was never well
founded. Education can do much, but what it does, or can do, is to
foster and develop _inherent possibilities,_ whether these are of
character, intelligence or aptitude: it cannot put into a boy or man
what was not there, _in posse,_ at birth, and humanly speaking, the
diversity of potential in any thousand units is limited only by the
number itself. Whether our present educational methods are those best
calculated to foster and develop these inherent possibilities, so varied
in nature and degree, is the question, and it is a question the answer
to which depends largely on whether we look on intelligence, capacity or
character as the thing of greatest moment. For those who believe that
character is the thing of paramount importance--amongst whom I count
myself--the answer must be in the negative.

Nor is an affirmative reply entirely assured when the question is asked
as to the results in the case of intellect and capacity. There are few
who would claim that in either of these directions the general standard
is now as high as it was, for example, in the last half of the last
century. The Great War brought to the front few personalities of the
first class, and the peace that has followed has an even less
distinguished record to date. We may say with truth, I think, that the
last ten years have provided greater issues, and smaller men to meet
them in the capacity of leaders, than any previous crisis of similar
moment. The art of leadership, and the fact of leadership, have been
lost, and without leadership any society, particularly a democracy, is
in danger of extinction.

Here again one cannot charge education with our lack of men of
character, intelligence and capacity to lead; as before, the causes lie
far deeper, but the almost fatal absence at this time of the
personalities of such force and power that they can captain society in
its hours of danger from war or peace, must give us some basis for
estimating the efficiency of our educational theory and practice, and
again raise doubts as to whether here also we shall be well advised if
we rely exclusively upon it as the ultimate saviour of society, while we
are bound to ask whether its methods, even of developing intelligence
and capacity, are the best that can be devised.

Another point worth considering is this. So long as we could lay the
flattering unction to our souls that acquired characteristics were
heritable, and that therefore if an outcast from Posen, migrating to
America, had taken advantage of his new opportunities and so had
developed his character-potential, amassed money and acquired a measure
of education and culture, he would automatically transmit something of
this to his offspring, who would start so much the further forward and
would tend normally to still greater advance, and so on _ad infinitum,_
so long we were justified in enforcing the widest measure of education
on all and sundry, and in waiting in hope for a future when the
cumulative process should have accomplished its perfect work. Now,
however, we are told that this hope is vain, that acquired
characteristics are not transmitted by heredity, and that the old
folk-proverb "it is only three generations between shirtsleeves and
shirtsleeves," is perhaps more scientifically exact than the
evolutionary dictum of the nineteenth century. Which is what experience
and history have been teaching, lo, these many years.

The question then seems to divide itself into three parts; (a) are we
justified in pinning our faith in ultimate social salvation to free,
secular, and compulsory education carried to the furthest possible
limits; (b) if not, then what precisely is the function of formal
education; and (c) this being determined, is our present method
adequate, and if not how should it be modified?

It is unwise to speak dogmatically along any of these lines, they are
too blurred and uncertain. I can only express an individual opinion.

It seems to me that life unvaryingly testifies to the extreme disparity
of potential in individuals and in families and in racial strains,
though in the two latter the difference is not necessarily absolute and
permanent, but variable in point of both time and degree. In individuals
the limit of this potentiality is inherent, and it can neither be
completely inhibited by adverse education and environment nor measurably
extended by favourable education and environment. Characteristics
acquired _outside_ inherent limitations are personal and non-heritable,
however intimately they may have become a part of the individual
himself.

If this is true, then the question of education becomes personal also;
that is to say, we educate for the individual, and with an eye to the
part he himself is to play in society. We do not look for cumulative
results but in a sense deal with each personality in regard to itself
alone. I think this has a bearing both on the extent to which education
should be enforced and on the quality and method of education itself,
and though the contention will receive little but ridicule, I am bound
to say that I hold that _general_ education should be reduced in
quantity and considerably changed in nature.

If the limit of development is substantially determined in each
individual and cannot be extended by human agencies (I say "human"
because God in His wisdom and by His power can raise up a prophet or a
saint out of the lowest depths, and frequently does so), then the
quantity and extent of general education should be determined not by a
period of years and the facilities offered by a government liberal in
its expenditures, but entirely by the demonstrated or indicated capacity
of the individual. Our educational system should, so far as it is free
and compulsory, normally end with the high school grade. Free college,
university and technical training should not be provided, except for
those who had given unmistakable evidences that they could, and probably
would, use it to advantage. This would be provided for by
non-competitive scholarships, limited in number only by the number of
capable candidates, and determination of this capacity would be, not on
the basis of test examinations, but on an average record covering a
considerable period of time. It is doubtful if even these scholarships
should be wholly free; some responsibility should be recognized, for a
good half of the value of a thing (perhaps all its value) lies in
working for it. A grant without service, a favour accepted without
obligations, privilege without function, both cheapen and degrade.

Let us now turn to the second question, i.e., what precisely is the
function of formal education. For my own part I can answer this in a
sentence. It is primarily the fostering and development of the
character-potential inherent in each individual. In this process
intellectual training and expansion and the furthering of natural
aptitude have a part, but this is secondary to the major object which is
the development of character.

This is not in accordance with the practice or the theory of recent
times, and in this fact lies one of the prime causes of failure. The one
thing man exists to accomplish is character; not worldly success and
eminence in any line, not the conquest of nature (though some have held
otherwise), not even "adaptation to environment" in the _argot_ of last
century science, but _character;_ the assimilation and fixing in
personality of high and noble qualities of thought and deed, the
furtherance, in a word, of the eternal sacramental process of redemption
of matter through the operation of spiritual forces. Without this,
social and political systems, imperial dominion, wealth and power, a
favourable balance of trade avail nothing; with it, forms and methods
and the enginery of living will look out for themselves. And yet this
thing which comprises "the whole duty of man" has, of late, fallen into
a singular disregard, while the constructive forces that count have
either been discredited and largely abandoned, as in the case of
religion, or, like education, turned into other channels or reversed
altogether, as has happened with the idea and practice of obedience,
discipline, self-denial, duty, honour and unselfishness; surely the most
fantastic issue of the era of enlightenment, of liberty and of freedom
of conscience.

As a matter of fact character, as the chief end of man and the sole
guaranty of a decent society, has been neglected; it was not disregarded
by any conscious process, but the headlong events that have followed
since the fifteenth century have steadily distorted our judgment and
confused our standards of value even to reversal. By an imperceptible
process other matters have come to engage our interest and control our
action, until at last we are confronted by the nemesis of our own
unwisdom, and we entertain the threat of a dissolving civilization just
because the forces we have engendered or set loose have not been curbed
or directed by that vigorous and potent personal character informing a
people and a society, that we had forgot in our haste and that alone
could give us safety.

Formal education is but one of the factors that may be employed towards
the development of character; you cannot so easily separate one force in
life from another, assigning a specific duty here, a definite task
there. That is one of the weaknesses of our time, the water-tight
compartment plan of high specialization, the cellular theory of
efficiency. Life must be seen as a whole, organized as a whole, lived as
a whole. Every thought, every emotion, every action, works for the
building or the unbuilding of character, and this synthesis of living
must be reestablished before we can hope for social regeneration.
Nevertheless formal education may be made a powerful factor, even now,
and not only in this one specific direction, but through this, for the
accomplishing of that unification of life that already is indicated as
the next great task that is set before us; and this brings me to a
consideration of the last of the questions I have proposed for answer,
viz.: is our present system of education adequate to the sufficient
development of character, and if not, how should it be modified?

I do not think it adequate, and experience seems to me to prove the
point. It has not maintained the sturdy if sometimes acutely unpleasant
character of the New England stock, or the strong and handsome character
of the race that dwelt in the thirteen original colonies as this
manifested itself well into the last century, and it has, in general,
bred no new thing in the millions of immigrants and their descendants
who have flooded the country since 1840 and from whom the public schools
and some of the colleges are largely recruited. It is not a question of
expanded brain power or applied aptitude, but of character, and here
there is a larger measure of failure than we had a right to expect. And
yet, had we this right? The avowed object of formal education is mental
and vocational training, and by no stretch of the imagination can we
hold these to be synonymous with character. We have dealt with and
through one thing alone, and that is the intellect, whereas character is
rather the product of emotions judiciously stimulated, balanced (not
controlled) by intellect, and applied through active and varied
experience. Deliberately have we cut out every emotional and spiritual
factor; not only religion and the fine arts, but also the studies, and
the methods of study, and the type of text-books, that might have helped
in the process of spiritual and emotional development. We have
eliminated Latin and Greek, or taught them as a branch of philology; we
have made English a technical exercise in analysis and composition,
disregarding the moral and spiritual significance of the works of the
great masters of English; we minimize ancient history and concentrate on
European history since the French Revolution, and on the history of the
United States, and because of the sensitiveness of our endless variety
of religionists (pro forma) text books are written which leave religion
out of history altogether--and frequently economics and politics as well
when these cannot be made to square with popular convictions; philosophy
and logic are already pretty well discarded, except for special
electives and post-graduate courses, and as for art in its multifarious
forms we know it not, unless it be in the rudimentary and devitalized
form of free-hand drawing and occasional concerted singing. The only
thing that is left in the line of emotional stimulus is competitive
athletics, and for this reason I sometimes think it one of the most
valuable factors in public education. It has, however, another function,
and that is the coordination of training and life; it is in a sense an
_école d'application,_ and through it the student, for once in a way,
tries out his acquired mental equipment and his expanding character--as
well as his physical prowess--against the circumstances of active
vitality. It is just this sort of thing that for so long made the
"public schools" of England, however limited or defective may have been
the curriculum, a vital force in the development of British character.

At best, however, this seems to me but an indifferent substitute, an
inadequate "extra," doing limitedly the real work of education by
indirection. What we need (granting my assumption of character as the
_terminus ad quem_) is an educational system so recast that the formal
studies and the collateral influences and the school life shall be more
coordinated in themselves and with life, and that the resulting stimulus
shall be equally operative along intellectual, emotional and creative
lines.

It is sufficiently easy to make suggestions as to how this is to be
accomplished, to lay out programmes and lay down curricula, but here as
elsewhere this does not amount to much; the change must come and the
institutions develop as the result of the operations of life. If we can
change our view of the object of education, the very force of life,
working through experience, will adequately determine the forms. It is
not therefore as a meticulous and mechanical system that I make the
following suggestions as to certain desirable changes, but rather to
indicate more exactly what I mean by a scheme of education that will
work primarily towards the development of character.

Now in the first place, I must hold that there can be no education which
works primarily for character building, that is not interpenetrated at
every point by definite, concrete religion and the practice of religion.
As I shall try to show in my last two lectures, religion is the force or
factor that links action with life. It is the only power available to
man that makes possible a sound standard of comparative values, and with
philosophy teaching man how to put things in their right order, it
enters to show him how to control them well, while it offers the great
constructive energy that makes the world an orderly unity rather than a
type of chaos. Until the Reformation there was no question as to this,
and even after, in the nations that accepted the great revolution, the
point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifugal tendency in
Protestantism resulted in such a wealth of mutually antagonistic sects
that the application of the principle became impracticable, and for
this, as well as for more fundamental reasons, it fell into desuetude.
The condition is as difficult today for the process of denominational
fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious
influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens. With our
157 varieties of Protestantism confronting Catholicism, Hebraism, and a
mass of frank rationalism and infidelity as large in amount as all
others combined, it would seem at first sight impossible to harmonize
free public education with concrete religion in any intimate way. So it
is; but if the principle is recognized and accepted, ways and means will
offer themselves, and ultimately the principle will be embodied in a
workable scheme.

For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever
enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary
legislation. At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that
reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are
known as "denominational schools" and other institutions of learning.
Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion
and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and
an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for
the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they
must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and
other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion
which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view. Again,
state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under
specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers,
established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those
who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate
themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both
unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious
individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are
possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to
fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from
the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried
out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and
private schools alike. This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or
Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough
to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high
school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their
own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the
funds of the city. This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after
an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put
such a law in force. From every point of view we should do well to
recognize this plan as both just and expedient. One virtue it would
have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit
in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one
school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that
standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most
mechanistic manifestation in France.

Of course this need for the fortifying of education by religion is
recognized even now, but the only plan devised for putting it into
effect is one whereby various ministers of religion are allowed a
certain brief period each week in which they may enter the public
schools and give denominational instruction to those who desire their
particular ministrations. This is one of the compromises, like the older
method of Bible reading without commentary or exposition, which avails
nothing and is apt to be worse than frank and avowed secularism. It is
putting religion on exactly the same plane as analytical chemistry,
psychoanalysis or salesmanship, (the latter I am told is about to be
introduced in the Massachusetts high schools) or any other "elective,"
whereas if it is to have any value whatever it must be an ever-present
force permeating the curriculum, the minds of the teachers, and the
school life from end to end, and there is no way in which this can be
accomplished except by a policy that will permit the maintenance of
schools under religious domination at the expense of the state, provided
they comply with certain purely educational requirements established and
enforced by the state.

I have already pointed out what seems to me the desirability of a
considerable variation between the curriculum of one school and another.
This would be possible and probably certain under the scheme proposed,
but barring this, it is surely an open question whether the pretty
thoroughly standardized curriculum now in operation would not be
considerably modified to advantage if it is recognized that the prime
object of education is character rather than mental training and the
fitting of a pupil to obtain a paying job on graduation. From my own
point of view the answer is in a vociferous affirmative. I suggest the
drastic reduction of the very superficial science courses in all schools
up to and including the high school, certainly in chemistry, physics and
biology, but perhaps with some added emphasis on astronomy, geology and
botany. History should become one of the fundamental subjects, and
English, both being taught for their humanistic value and not as
exercises in memory or for the purpose of making a student a sort of
dictionary of dates. This would require a considerable rewriting of
history text books, as well as a corresponding change in the methods of
teaching, but after all, are not these both consummations devoutly to be
wished. There are few histories like Mr. Chesterton's "Short History of
England," unfortunately. One would, perhaps, hardly commend this
stimulating book as a sufficient statement of English history for
general use in schools, but its approach is wholly right and it
possesses the singular virtue of interest. Another thing that commends
it is the fact that while it runs from Caesar to Mr. Lloyd George, it
contains, I believe, only seven specific dates, three of which are
possibly wrong. This is as it should be--not the inaccuracies but the
commendable frugality in point of number. Dates, apart from a few key
years, are of small historical importance; so are the details of palace
intrigues and military campaigns. History is, or should be, life
expressed in terms of romance, and it is of little moment whether the
narrated incidents are established by documentary evidence or whether
they are contemporary legend quite unsubstantiated by what are known
(and overestimated) as "facts." There is more of the real Middle Ages in
Mallory's "Mort d'Arthur" than there is in all Hallam, and the same
antithesis can be established for nearly all other periods of history.

The history of man is one great dramatic romance, and so used it may be
made perhaps the most stimulating agency in education as character
development. I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes
it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever coördination of
unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and
aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by
all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any
other art at communicating from one person to another something of the
inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the
material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal. The
deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism.
The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale
that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an
instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.

I would not exchange Kit Marlowe's

  _"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"_

for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character
and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by
archaeological investigations. I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims
never said in so many words "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy
what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed," and that
the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an "order of the day"
that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized
by battalions; but _there_ is the clear, unforgettable picture of the
times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that
some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself
was probably only a variant of the great and original "sun-myth."

Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it
were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present
unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in
education as a method of character development. Life has always focused
in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while
showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment, in the
choices it has made. A past period becomes our own in so far as we
translate it through its personalities and its art; the original
documents matter little, except when they become misleading, as they
frequently do, when read through contemporary spectacles. Now the great
figures of a time are not only princes and politicians, conquerors and
conspirators, they are quite as apt to be the knights and heroes and
brave gentlemen who held no conspicuous position in Church or state. I
think we need what might be called "The Golden Book of Knighthood"--or a
series of text books adapted to elementary and advanced schools--made up
of the lives and deeds (whether attested by "original documents," or
legendary or even fabulous does not matter) of those in all times, and
amongst all peoples, who were the glory of knighthood; the "parfait
gentyl Knyghtes" "without fear and without reproach." Such for example,
to go no farther back than the Christian Era, as St. George and St.
Martin, King Arthur and Launcelot and Galahad, Charles Martel and
Roland, St. Louis, Godfrey de Bouillon and Saladin, the Earl of
Strafford, Montrose and Claverhouse, the Chevalier Bayard, Don John of
Austria, Washington and Robert Lee and George Wyndham. These are but a
few names, remembered at random; there are scores besides, and I think
that they should be held up to honour and emulation throughout the
formative period of youth. After all, they became, during the years when
these qualities were exalted, the personification of the ideals of
honour and chivalry, of compassion and generosity, of service and
self-sacrifice and courtesy, and these, the qualifications of a
gentleman and a man or honour, are, with the religion that fostered
them, and the practice of that religion, the just objective of
education.

Much of all this can even now be taught through a judicious use of the
opportunities offered instructors in English, whether this is through
the graded "readers" of elementary education, or the more extended
courses in colleges and universities. Very frequently these
opportunities are ignored, and will be until we achieve something of a
new orientation in the matter of teaching English.

Now it may be I hold a vain and untenable view of this subject, but I am
willing to confess that I believe the object of teaching English is the
unlocking of the treasures of thought, character and emotion preserved
in the written records of the tongue, and the arousing of a desire to
know and assimilate these treasures on the part of the pupil. I am very
sure that English should not be taught as a thing ending in "ology," not
as an intricate science with all sorts of laws and rules and exceptions;
not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the
offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of
Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with
acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced
Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or
the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an
aim as this will always result in failure.

The English language is the great storehouse of the rich thought and the
burning emotion of the English race, and all this, as it has issued out
of character, works towards the development of character, when it is
made operative in new generations. There is no other language but Latin
that has preserved so great a wealth of invaluable things, and English
is taught in order that it all may be more available through that
appreciation that comes from familiarity. There is no nobler record in
the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of
character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature
is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to
say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student
to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and
through it to come to the liking of great ideas?

In the old days there was an historical, or rather archaeological,
method that was popular; also an analytical and grammarian method. There
was also the philological method which was quite the worst of all and
had almost as devastating results as in the case of Latin. It almost
seems as though English were being taught for the production of a
community of highly specialized teachers. No one would now go back to
any of those quaint and archaic ways digged up out of the dim and remote
past of the XIXth century. We should all agree, I think, that for
general education, specialized technical knowledge is unimportant and
scientific intensive methods unjustifiable. For one student who will
turn out a teacher there are five hundred that will be just simple
voters, wage-earners, readers of the Saturday Evening Post and the New
Republic, members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church or the Ethical
Society, and respectable heads of families. The School of Pedagogy has
its own methods (I am given to understand), but under correction I
submit they are not those of general education. Shall I put the whole
thing in a phrase and say that the object of teaching English is to get
young people to like good things?

You may say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very
far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available.
"Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love
of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far
more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the
principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and
facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws
should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are
derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that
needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive _"distinguo."_
Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English
composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little
use unless _thought_ keeps ahead of the pen.

I would plead then for the teaching of English after a fashion that will
reveal great thoughts and stimulate to greater life, through the noble
art of English literature and the perfectly illogical but altogether
admirable English language. The function of education is to make
students feel, think and act, after a fashion that increasingly reveals
and utilizes the best that is in them, and increasingly serves the uses
of society, and both history and English can be so taught as to help
towards the accomplishment of these ends.

There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak
of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages,
entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense
that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics,
who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a
prime element in education, there are none--or only a minority so small
as to be negligible--who give a thought to art in this connection. I
bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence,
even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word
altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth
century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the
disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and
it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly
more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is
wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes
self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly
differentiated individuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then
it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate,
both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece,
Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few
decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of
expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an
environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give
any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were
its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The
things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the
painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and
poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular
and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages
in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art,
was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily
health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for
granted.

Now all is changed. For just an hundred years (the process definitely
began here in America between 1820 and 1823) we have been eliminating
beauty as an attribute of life and living until, during the last two
generations, it is true to say that the instinctive impulse of the race
as a whole is towards ugliness in those categories of creation and
appreciation where formerly it had been towards beauty. Of course the
corollary of this was the driving of the unhappy man in whom was born
some belated impulse towards the apprehending of beauty and its visible
expression in some art, back upon himself, until, conscious of his
isolation and confident of his own superiority, he not only made his art
a form of purely personal expression (or even of exposure), but held
himself to be, and so conducted himself, as a being apart, for whom the
laws of the herd were not, and to whom all men should bow.

The separation of art from life is only less disastrous in its results
than the separation of religion from life, particularly since with the
former went the separation of art (and therefore of beauty) from its
immemorial alliance with religion. It was bad for art, it was bad for
religion, and it was worst of all for life itself. Beyond a certain
point man cannot live in and with and through ugliness, nor can society
endure under such conditions, and the fact is that, however it came to
pass, modern civilization has functioned through explicit ugliness, and
the environment it has made for its votaries and its rebels
indifferently, is unique in its palpable hideousness; from the clothes
it wears and the motives it extols, to the cities it builds, and the
structures therein, and the scheme of life that romps along in its
ruthless career within the sordid suburbs that take the place of the
once enclosing walls. And the defiant and segregated "artists," mortuary
art museums, the exposed statues and hidden pictures, the opera
subsidized by "high society," and the "arts and crafts" societies and
the "art magazines" and "art schools" and clubs and "city beautiful"
committees, only seem to make the contrast more apparent and the
desperate nature of the situation more profound.

It is a new situation altogether, and nowhere in history is there any
recorded precedent to which we can return for council and example, for
nothing quite of the same sort ever happened before. It is also a
problem of which formal education must take cognizance, for the lack is
one which must somehow be supplied, while it reveals an astonishing
_lacuna_ in life that means a new deficiency in the unconscious
education of man that renders him ineffective in life; defective even,
it may be, unless from some source he can acquire something of what in
the past life itself could afford.

Indeed it is not merely a negative influence we deal with, but a
positive, for, to paraphrase a little, "ugly associations corrupt good
morals." Youth is beaten upon at many points by things that not only
look ugly, but are, and as in compassion we are bound to offer some new
agency to fill a lack, so in self-defence we must take thought as to how
the evil influence of contemporaneousness is to be nullified and its
results corrected.

I confess the method seems to me to lean more closely to the indirect
influence rather than the direct. It is doubtful if "art" can really be
taught in any sense; the inherent sense of beauty can be fostered and an
inherent aptitude developed, but that is about all. As for the building
up of a non-professional passion for art I am quite sure it cannot be
done, and should hardly be attempted, and very likely the same is true
of the application of beauty.

Text books on "How to Understand" this art or that are interesting
ventures into abstract theory, but they are little more. We must always
remember that art is a result, not a product, and that sense of beauty
is a natural gift and not an accomplishment. On the other hand, much can
be accomplished by indirection, and by this I mean the buildings and the
grounds and the cultural adjuncts that are offered by any school or
college. The ordinary type of school-house--primary, grammar or high
school--is, in its barren ugliness and its barbarous "efficiency," a
very real outrage on decency, and a few Braun photographs and plaster
casts and potted plants avail nothing. Private schools and some
colleges--by no means all--are apt to be somewhat better, and here the
improvement during the last ten years has been amazing, one or two
universities having acquired single buildings, or groups, of the most
astonishing architectural beauty. In no case, however, has as yet
complete unity been achieved, while the arts of painting, sculpture,
music and the drama, as vital and operative and pervasive influences,
lag far behind, and formal religion with its liturgies and ceremonial,
its constant and varied services and its fine and appealing
pageantry--religion which is the greatest vitalizing and stimulating
force in beauty is hardly touched at all.

Bad art of any kind is bad anywhere, but in any type of educational
institution, from the kindergarten to the post graduate college, it is
worse and less excusable than it is elsewhere, unless it be in
association with religion, while the absence of beauty at the
instigation of parsimony or efficiency is just as bad. I am firmly
persuaded that we need, not more courses of study but more beautiful
environment for scholars under instruction.

I have touched cursorily on certain elements in education which need
either a new emphasis or an altogether new interpretation; religion,
history, art, but this does not mean that the same treatment should not
be accorded elsewhere. There are certain studies that should be revived,
such as formal logic, there are others that need immediate and complete
restoration, as Latin for example, there are many, chiefly along
scientific and vocational lines, that could well be minimized, or in
some cases dispensed with altogether: one might go on indefinitely on
this line, however, weighing and testing studies in relation to their
character-value, but certainly enough has already been said to indicate
the point of view I would urge for consideration. Before I close,
however, I want to touch on two points that arise in connection with
college education, if, even for the sake of argument, we admit that the
primary object of all formal education is the "education" of the
character-capacity in each individual.

Of these two, the first has to do with the college curriculum, but I
need to devote little time to this for the principle has already been
developed and applied in a singularly stimulating and lucid book called
"The Liberal College," by President Meiklejohn of Amherst, to which I
beg to refer you. The scheme is a remarkable blending of the prescribed
and the elective systems, and provides for the freshman year five
compulsory studies, viz.: Social and Economic Institutions, Mathematics
and Formal Logic, Science, English and Foreign Languages; for the
sophomore year European History, Philosophy, Science, Literature, and
one elective; for the junior year American History, History of Thought
and two electives, and for the senior year one required study,
Intellectual and Moral Problems, and one elective, the latter, which
takes two-thirds of the student's time, must be a continuation of one of
the four subjects included in the junior year. It seems to me that this
is a singularly wise programme, since it not only determines the few
studies which are fundamental, and imposes them on the student in
diminishing number as he advances in his work, but it also provides for
that freedom of choice which permits any student to find out and
continue the particular line along which his inclinations lead him to
travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest
possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives
all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and
tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical
democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the
ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite
line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as
a force and to base itself on this sure foundation instead of on the
shifting sands of doctrinaire theory, and if this is so then it is
right.

For after all there is such a thing as life, and it is more potent than
theory as it also has a way of disregarding or even smashing the
machine. It is this force of life that should be more regarded in
education, and more relied upon. It is the living in a school or a
college that counts more than a curriculum; the association with others,
students and teachers, the communal life, the common adventures and
scrapes, the common sports, yes, and as it will be sometime, the common
worship. It is through these that life works and character develops, and
to this development and instigation of life the school and college
should work more assiduously, minimizing for the moment the problems of
curricula and pedagogic methods. If I am right in this there is no place
for the "correspondence school," while the college or university that
numbers its students by thousands becomes at least of doubtful value,
and perhaps impossible. In any case it seems to me self-evident that a
college, whatever its numbers, must have, as its primal and essential
units, self-contained groups of not more than 150 students segregated in
their own residential quad, with its common-room, refectory and chapel,
and with a certain number of faculty members in residence, the whole
being united under one "head." There may be perhaps no reason why,
granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number
until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state
university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university"
with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate
mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large
as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for
safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A
college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and as a mob it ought to
be put down.

I said at the outset of this lecture that we could not lay the present
failure of civilization to the doors of education, however great its
shortcomings, for the causes lay deeper than this. I maintain that this
is true; and yet formal education can not escape scatheless, for it has
failed to admit this decline while acknowledging the claim set up for it
that it could and would achieve this end. Certainly it will incur a
heavy responsibility if it does not at once recognize the fact that
while it can not do the half that has been claimed for it, it can do far
more than it is doing now, and that in a very large degree the future
does depend for its honour or its degradation on the part formal
education is to perform at the present crisis. To do this it must
execute a _volte face_ and confess that it can only develop inherent
potential, not create capacity, and that the primary object of its
activities must be not the stall-feeding of intellect and the practical
preparation for a business career, but the fostering and the building up
of the personal character that denotes the Christian gentleman. I do not
think that I can do better for a conclusion than to quote from the
"Philosophy of Education" by the late Dr. Thomas Edward Shields.

"The unchanging aim of Christian education is, and always has been, to
put the pupil into possession of a body of truth derived from nature and
from Divine Revelation, from the concrete work of man's hand and from
the content of human speech, in order to bring his conduct into
conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the
civilization of his day.

"Christian education, therefore, aims at transforming native instincts
while preserving and enlarging their powers. It aims at bringing the
flesh under the control of the spirit. It draws upon the experience and
the wisdom of the race, upon Divine Revelation and upon the power of
Divine grace, in order that it may bring the conduct of the individual
into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the
civilization of the day. It aims at the development of the whole man, at
the preservation of unity and continuity in his conscious life; it aims
at transforming man's native egotism to altruism; at developing the
social side of his nature to such an extent that he may regard all men
as his brothers; sharing with them the common Fatherhood of God. In one
word, it aims at transforming a child of the flesh into a child of God."




VII


THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION

If philosophy is "the science of the totality of things," and "they are
called wise who put things in their right order and control them well,"
then it is religion, above all other factors and potencies, that enters
in to reveal the right relationships and standards of value, and to
contribute the redemptive and energizing force that makes possible the
adequate control which is the second factor in the conduct of the man
that is "called wise." Philosophy and religion are not to be confounded;
religion is sufficient in itself and develops its own philosophy, but
the latter is not sufficient in itself, and when it assumes the
functions and prerogatives of religion, it brings disaster.

Religion is the force that relates action to life. Of course it has
other aspects, higher in essence and more impalpable in quality, but it
is this first aspect I shall deal with, because I am not now speaking of
religion as a purely spiritual power but only of its quality as the
great coordinator of human action, the power that establishes a right
ratio of values and gives the capacity for right control. Whether we
accept the religion of the Middle Ages or not; whether we look on the
period as one of high and edifying Christian civilization, or as a time
of ignorance and superstition, we are bound to admit that society in its
physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects was highly organized, and
coordinated after a most masterly fashion. It was more nearly an unit,
functioning lucidly and consistently, than anything the world has known
since the Roman Empire. Whatever its defects, lack of coherency was not
one of them. Life was not divided into water-tight compartments, but
moved on as a consistent whole. Failures were constant, for the world
even then was made up of men, but the ideal was perfectly clear-cut, the
principles exactly seen and explicitly formulated; life was organic,
consistent, highly articulated, and withal as full of the passion of
aspiration towards an ultimate ideal as was the Gothic cathedral which
is its perfect exemplar.

The reason for this coherency and consistency was the universal
recognition and acceptance of religion as the one energizing and
standardizing force in life, the particular kind of religion that then
prevailed, and the organic power which this religion had established;
that is to say, the Church as an operative institution. So long as this
condition obtained, which was, roughly speaking, for three hundred
years, from the "Truce of God" in 1041 to the beginning of the
"Babylonian Captivity" of the Papacy at Avignon in 1309, there was
substantial unity in life, but as soon as it was shaken, this unity
began to break up into a diversity that accomplished a condition of
chaos, at and around the opening of the sixteenth century, which only
yielded to the absolutism of the Renaissance, destined in its turn to
break up into a second condition of chaos under the influence of
industrialism, Puritanism and revolution.

Since the accomplishment of the Reformation, this function of religion
has never been restored to society in any degree comparable with that
which it maintained during the Middle Ages. The Counter-Reformation
preserved the institution itself in the Mediterranean lands, but it did
not restore its old spiritual power in its entirety. Amongst the peoples
that accepted the Reformation the new religion assumed for a time the
authority of the old, but the centrifugal force inherent in its nature
soon split the reformed churches into myriad fragments, so destroying
their power of action, while the abandonment of the sacramental system
progressively weakened their dynamic force. As it had from the first
compounded, under compulsion, with absolutism and tyranny, so in the end
it compromised with the cruelty, selfishness, injustice and avarice of
industrialism, and when finally this achieved world supremacy, and
physical science, materialistic philosophy and social revolution entered
the field as co-combatants, it no longer possessed a sufficient original
power either of resistance or of re-creative energy.

Religion is in itself not the reaction of the human mind, under process
of evolution, to certain physical stimuli of experience and phenomena,
it is supernatural in that its source is outside nature; it is a
manifestation of the grace of God, and as such it cannot be brought into
existence by any conscious action of man or by any of his works. On the
other hand, it can be fostered and preserved, or debilitated and
dispersed, by these human acts and institutions, and in the same way man
himself may be made more receptive to this divine grace, or turned
against it, by the same agencies, the teachings of Dr. John Calvin to
the contrary notwithstanding. This is part of the Catholic doctrine of
free-will as opposed to the sixteenth-century dogma of predestination
which, distorted and degraded from the doctrine of St. Paul and St.
Augustine, played so large a part in that transformation of the
Christian religion from which we have suffered ever since. God offers
the free gift of religion and of faith to every child of man, but the
recipient must cooperate if the gift is to be accepted. The Church, that
is to say, the supernatural organism that is given material form in time
and space and operates through human agencies, is for this reason
subject to great vicissitudes, now rising to the highest level of
righteousness and power, now sinking into depths of unrighteousness and
impotence. Nothing, however, can affect the validity and the potency of
its supernatural content and its supernatural channels of grace. These
remain unaffected, whether the human organism is exalted or debased. The
sacraments and devotions and practices of worship, are in themselves as
potent if a Borgia sits in the chair of St. Peter as they are if a
Hildebrand, and Innocent III or a Leo XIII is the occupant; nevertheless
every weakening or degradation of the visible organism affects, and
inevitably, the attitude of men towards the thing itself, and when this
declension sets in and continues unchecked, the result is, first, a
falling away and a discrediting of religion that sometimes results in
general abandonment, and second--and after a time--a new outpouring of
spiritual power that results in complete regeneration. The Church, in
its human manifestation, is as subject to the rhythmical rise and fall
of the currents of life as is the social organism or man himself,
therefore it is not to be expected that it will pursue a course of even
exaltation, or maintain a status that is impeccable.

Now the working out of this law had issue in a great decline that began
with the Exile at Avignon and was not terminated until the Council of
Trent. In the depth of this catastrophe came the natural and righteous
revolt against the manifold and intolerable abuses, but, like all
reforming movements that take on a revolutionary character, reform and
regeneration were soon forgotten in the unleashed passion for
destruction and innovation, while the new doctrines of emancipation from
authority, and the right of private judgment in religious matters, were
seized upon by sovereigns chafing under ecclesiastical control, as a
providential means of effecting and establishing their own independence,
and so given an importance, and an ultimate victory that, in and by
themselves, they could hardly have achieved. In the end it was the
secular and autocratic state that reaped the victory, not the reformed
religion, which was first used as a tool and then abandoned to its
inevitable break-up into numberless antagonistic sects, some of them
retaining a measure of the old faith and polity, others representing all
the illiteracy and uncouthness and fanaticism of the new racial and
social factors as these emerged at long last from the submergence and
the oppression that had been their fate with the dissolution of
Mediaevalism.

Meanwhile the Roman Church which stood rigidly for historic Christianity
and had been preserved by the Counter-Reformation to the Mediterranean
states, continued bound to the autocratic and highly centralized
administrative system that had become universal among secular powers
during the decadence of Mediaevalism, and from which it had taken its
colour, and it kept even pace for the future with the progressive
intensification of this absolutism. This was natural, though in many
respects deplorable, and it can be safely said that adverse criticism of
the Catholic Church today is based only on qualities it acquired during
the period of Renaissance autocracy and revived paganism; qualities that
do not affect its essential integrity or authority but do misrepresent
it before men, and work as a handicap in its adaptability and in its
work of winning souls to Christianity and re-establishing the unity of
Christendom. Fortunately this very immobility has saved it from a
surrender to the new forces that were developed in secular society
during the last two centuries, as it did yield to the compulsion of
those that were let loose in the two that preceded them. It has never
subjected questions of faith and morals to popular vote nor has it
determined discipline by parliamentary practice under a well developed
party system, therefore it has preserved its unity, its integrity and
its just standard of comparative values. On the other hand, it has held
so stubbornly to some of the ill ways of Renaissance centralization,
which are in no sense consonant with its character, that it has failed
to retard the constant movement of society away from a life wherein
religion was the dominating and coordinating force, while at the present
crisis it is as yet hardly more able than a divisive Protestantism to
offer the regenerative energy that a desperate case demands.

I do not know whether secular society is responsible for the decadence
of religion, or the decadence of religion is responsible for the failure
of secular society, nor does it particularly matter. What I am concerned
with is a condition amounting to almost complete severance between the
two, and how we may "knit up this ravelled sleeve" of life so that once
more we may have an wholesome unity in place of the present disunity;
for until this is accomplished, until once more religion enters into the
very marrow of social being, enters with all its powers of judgment and
determination and co-ordination and creative energy, just so long shall
we seek in vain for our way out into the Great Peace of righteous and
consistent living.

Of course there is only one sure way, one method by which this, and all
our manifold difficulties, can be resolved, and that is through the
achieved enlightenment of the individual. As I have insisted in each of
these lectures, salvation is not through machinery but through the
individual soul, for it is life itself that is operating, not the
instruments that man devises in his ingenuity. Yet the mechanism is of
great value for even itself may give aid and stimulus in the personal
regenerative process, or, on the contrary, it may deter this by the
confusing and misleading influences it creates. Therefore we are bound
to regard material reforms, and of these, as they suggest themselves in
the field of organized religion, I propose to speak.

No one will deny the progressive alienation of life from religion that
has developed since the Reformation and has now reached a point of
almost complete severance. Religion, once a public preoccupation, has
now withdrawn to the fastnesses of the individual soul, when it has not
vanished altogether, as it has in the case of the majority of citizens
of this Republic in so far as definite faith, explicit belief,
application, practice and action are concerned. In the hermitage that
some still make within themselves, religion still lives on as ardent and
as potent and as regenerative as before, but in general, if we are to
judge from the conduct of recent life, it is held, when it is accepted
at all, with a certain formality, and is neither cherished with
conviction nor allowed to interfere with the everyday life of the
practical man. As a great English statesman remarked in the last
century, "No one has a higher regard for religion than I, but when it
comes to intruding it into public affairs, well, really--!"

The situation is one not unnaturally to be anticipated, for the whole
course of religious, secular and sociological development during the
last few centuries has been such as to make any other result improbable.
I already have tried to show what seem to me the destructive factors,
secularly and sociologically. As for the factors in religious
development that have worked towards the same end, they are, first, the
shattering of the unity of Christendom, with the denial by those of the
reformed religions of the existence of a Church, one, visible and
Catholic and infallible in matters of faith and morals; second, the
denial of sacramental philosophy and abandonment of the sacraments (or
all but one, or at most two of them) as instruments of Divine Grace;
third, the surrender of the various religious organisms to the
compulsion of the materialistic, worldly and opportunist factors in the
secular life of modernism. The truths corresponding to these three
errors are, Unity, Sacramentalism and Unworldliness. Until these three
things are won back, Christianity will fail of its full mission, society
will continue aimless, uncoördinate and on the verge of disaster, life
itself will lack the meaning and the reality that give both joy in the
living and victory in achievement, while the individual man will be
gravely handicapped in the process of personal regeneration.

It is not my purpose to frame a general indictment against persons and
movements, but rather to suggest certain ways and means of possible
recovery, and in general I shall try to confine myself to that form of
organized religion to which I personally adhere, that is to say, the
Anglican or Episcopal Church, partly because of my better knowledge of
its conditions, and partly because whatever is said may in most cases be
equally well applied to the Protestant denominations.

_The unity of the Church._ It is no longer necessary to demonstrate this
fundamental necessity. The old days of the nineteenth century are gone,
those days when honest men vociferously acclaimed as honourable and
glorious "the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the
Protestant religion." Everyone knows now, everyone, that is, that
accepts Christianity, that disunion is disgrace if not a very palpable
sin. The desire for a restored unity is almost universal, but every
effort in this direction, whatever its source, meets with failure, and
the reason would appear to be that the approach is made from the wrong
direction. In every case the individual is left alone, his personal
beliefs and practices are, he is assured, jealously guarded; all that is
asked is that some mechanical amalgamation, some official approximation
shall be effected.

Free interchange of pulpits, a system of reciprocal re-ordination, a
"merger" of church property and parsons, an "irreducible minimum" of
credal insistencies these, and others even more ingeniously
compromising, are the well-meaning schemes that are put forward, and in
the process one point after another is surrendered, as a _quid pro quo_
for the formal and technical capitulation of some other religious group.

It is demonstrable that even if these well-meaning approximations were
received with favour--and thus far nothing of the kind has appeared--the
result, so far as essential unity is concerned, would be _nil._ There is
a perfectly definite line of division between the Catholic and the
Protestant, and until this line is erased there is no possible unity,
even if this were only official and administrative. The Catholic (and in
respect to this one particular point I include under this title members
of the Roman, Anglican and Eastern Communions) maintains and practices
the sacramental system; the Protestant does not. There is no reason,
there is indeed grave danger of sacrilege, in a joint reception of the
Holy Communion by those who look on it as a mere symbol and those who
accept it as the very Body and Blood of Christ. Protestant clergy are
urged to accept ordination at the hands of Anglican bishops, but the
plea is made on the ground of order, expediency, and the preservation of
tradition; whereas the Apostolical succession was established and
enforced not for these reasons but in order that the grace of God,
originally imparted by Christ Himself, may be continued through the
lines He ordained, for the making and commissioning of priests who have
power to serve as the channels for the accomplishing of the divine
miracle of the Holy Eucharist, to offer the eternal Sacrifice of the
Body and Blood of Christ for the quick and the dead, and to remit the
penalty of sins through confession and absolution. If the laying on of
hands by the bishop were solely a matter of tradition and discipline,
neither Rome nor the Anglican Communion would be justified in holding to
it as a condition of unity; if it is for the transmission of the Holy
Ghost for the making of a Catholic priest, with all that implies and has
always implied, then it is wrong, even in the interests of a formal
unity, to offer it to those who believe neither in the priesthood nor in
the sacraments in the Catholic and historic sense.

The conversion of the individual must take precedence of corporate
action of any sort. When the secularist comes to believe in the Godhead
of Christ he will unite himself with the rest of the faithful in a
Church polity, but he will not do this, he has too much self-respect,
simply because he is told by some ardent but minimizing parson that he
does not have to believe in the Divinity of Christ in order to "join the
church." When a Protestant comes to accept the sacramental system, to
desire to participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the altar, to make
confession of his sins and receive absolution, and to nourish and
develop his spiritual nature by the use of the devotions that have grown
up during nineteen hundred years, he will renounce his Protestantism,
when his self-respect would not permit him to do this just because he
had been assured that he need not really change any of his previous
beliefs in order to ally himself with a Church that had better
architecture and a more artistic ceremonial, and locally a higher social
standing. When Anglicans or the Eastern Orthodox come to believe that a
vernacular liturgy and a married priesthood and provincial autonomy are
of less importance than Catholic unity, and when Roman Catholics can see
that the same is of greater moment than a rigid preservation of
Renaissance centralization and a cold _"non possumus"_ in the matter of
Orders, then the way will be open for the reunion of the West, where
this operation cannot be affected by formal negotiations looking towards
some form of legalistic concordat.

The evil heritage of the sixteenth century is still heavy upon us, and
this heritage is one of jealousy and hate, not of charity and
toleration. It is an heritage of legalism and technicalities, of
self-will and individualism, of shibboleths that have become a dead
letter, of prejudices that are fostered on distorted history and the
propaganda of the self-seeking and the vain. The spirit of Christ is not
in it, but the malice of Satan working upon the better natures of men
and justifying in the name of conscience and principle what are
frequently the workings of self-will and pride and intellectual
obsession. This is the tragedy of it all; that Protestants and Anglicans
and Roman Catholics are, so far as the majority are concerned, honestly
convinced that they are right in maintaining their own divisiveness; in
perpetuating an hundred Protestant sects on the basis of some variation
in the form of baptism or church government or the method of conversion;
in splitting up the Catholic Church because of a thousand year old
disagreement as to a clause in the Creed which has a technical and
theological significance only, or because one sector is alleged to have
added unjustifiably to the Faith while the other is alleged to have
unjustifiably taken away. Self-will and lack of charity, not love and
the common will as these are revealed to the world through the Divine
Will of Christ, are working here. The momentary triumph of evil over
good, the passing victory that yet means the banishment of religion from
the world, and the assurance of disaster still greater than that which
is now upon us unless every man bends all his energies to the task of
making the will of God prevail, first in himself, and so in the secular
and ecclesiastical societies in and through which he plays his part in
the life of the world--these are the fruits of a divided Christendom.

I honestly believe that the first real step towards reunion would be a
prompt cessation of the whole process of criticism, vilification and
abuse, one of the other, that now marks the attitude of what are known
as "church periodicals." Roman, Anglican, Protestant, are all alike, for
all maintain a consistent slanging of each other. I have in mind in
particular weekly religious papers in the United States which maintain
departments almost wholly made up of attacks on Roman Catholicism and
the derision of incidents of bad taste or illiteracy in the Protestant
denominations, and others which lose no opportunity to discredit or
abuse the Episcopal Church and the Protestant denominations, and finally
a curiously malevolent newspaper representing the worst type of
Protestant ignorance and prejudice, which exists on its libelous and
indecent and dishonest assaults on Catholicism wherever it may be found.
These are not alone, for the condition of ascerbity and nagging is
practically universal. It merely echoes the pulpit and a portion of the
general public. We all know of the so called "church" in Boston that is
the forum of "escaped nuns" and "unfrocked priests," but in many places
of better repute the sermon that bitterly attacks Christian Science, or
"High Church Episcopalianism," or the errors of Protestantism generally,
or the "usurpations of Rome" is by no means unknown, while elsewhere
than in Ireland, the public as a whole finds much pleasure in bating any
religion that happens to differ from its own,--or offends its sense of
the uselessness of all religion. Let us have a new "Truce of God," and
for the space of a year let all clergy, lecturers, newspapers, religious
journals, and private individuals, totally abstain from sneering and
ill-natured attacks on other religions and their followers. Could this
be accomplished a greater step would be taken towards the reunion of
Christendom than could be achieved by any number of conferences,
commissions, councils and conventions.

It was the will and the intent of Christ "that they all may be one, that
the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me," and in disunity we deny
Christ. There is no consideration of inheritance, of personal taste, of
interests, of intellectual persuasion that can stand in the way of an
affirmative answer to this prayer. Every man who calls himself a
Christian and yet is not praying and working to break down the self-will
and the self-conceit that, so often under the masquerade of conscience,
hold him back from a return, even if it is only step by step, to the
original unity of the Catholic Faith, is guilty of sin, while it is sin
of an even graver degree that stands to the account of those who
consciously work to perpetuate the division that now exists.

_Sacramentalism._ The stumbling block, the apparently impassable
barrier, is that which was erected when belief was substituted for
faith; it is the intellectualizing of religion that has brought about
the present failure of Christianity as a vital and controlling force in
man and in society. The danger revealed itself even in the Middle Ages,
and through perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher, and certainly
one of the most commanding intellects, the world has known: St. Thomas
Aquinas. In his case, and that of the others of his time, the intellect
was still directed by spiritual forces, the chiefest of which was faith,
therefore the inherent danger in the intellectualizing process did not
clearly reveal itself or come into actual operation, but with the
Renaissance and the Reformation it stood boldly forth, and since then as
mind increased in its dominion faith declined. The Reformation, in all
its later phases, that is to say, after it ceased to be a protest
against moral defects and administrative abuses and became a
revolutionary invention of new dogmas and practices, was the result of
clever, stupid or perverse minds working overtime on religious problems
which could not be solved or even apprehended by the intellect, whether
it was that of an acute and highly trained master such as Calvin, or
that of any one of the hundred founders of less savage but more curious
and uncouth types of "reformed religion."

What we need now for the recovery and re-establishment of Christianity
is not so much increased belief as it is a renewed faith; faith in
Christ, faith in His doctrine, faith in His Church. We lost this faith
when we abandoned the sacraments and sacramentalism as superstitions, or
retained some of them in form and as symbols while denying to them all
supernatural power. If we would aid the individual soul to regain this
lost faith we could do no better than to restore the seven sacraments of
the historic Christian faith, and Christian Church to the place they
once held for all Christians, and still hold in the Roman Catholic
Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and (with limitations) in the
Anglican Church. Faith begets faith; faith in Christ brings faith in the
sacraments, and faith in the sacraments brings faith in Christ.

It is disbelief in the efficacy of the sacraments and in the sacramental
principle in life that is the essential barrier between Protestantism
and Catholicism, and until this barrier is dissolved there can be
neither formal unity nor unity by compromise. This is already widely
recognized, and as well the actual loss that comes with the denial and
abandonment of the sacraments. There is in the Presbyterian church of
Scotland a strong tendency towards a reassertion of the full sacramental
doctrine; the "Free Catholic" movement throughout Great Britain is made
up of Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and other
representatives of Evangelical Protestantism, and it is working
unreservedly for the recovery and application of all the Catholic
sacraments, with the devotions and ritual that go with them. Dr.
Orchard, the head, and a Congregational minister, maintains in London a
church where, as a Methodist member of the "Free Catholic" organization
wrote me the other day, "the Blessed Sacrament is perpetually reserved
and 'High Mass' is celebrated on Sundays with the full Catholic
ceremonial." In my own practice of architecture I am constantly
providing Presbyterian, Congregational, and even Unitarian churches, by
request, with chancels containing altars properly vested and ornamented
with crosses and candles, while the almost universal demand is for
church edifices that shall approach as nearly as possible in appearance
to the typical Catholic church of the Middle Ages. Of course some of
this is due to a revived instinct for beauty, that almost sacramental
quality in life which was ruthlessly destroyed by Protestantism, and
also to a renewed sense of the value of symbol and ritual; but back of
it all is the growing consciousness that, as Dr. Newman Smythe says,
Protestantism has definitely failed, or at least become superannuated;
that the essence of religion is spiritual not intellectual, affirmative
not negative, and that the only measure of safety lies in a return
towards, if not actually to, the Catholic faith and practice from which
the old revolt was affected. It is a movement both significant and full
of profound encouragement.

Here then are two tendencies that surely show the way and demand
encouragement and furtherance; recovery of the sense of Christian unity
in Christ and through an united Catholic Church, and the re-acceptance
of sacramentalism as the expression of that faith and as the method of
that Church. I feel very strongly that wherever these tendencies show
themselves they must be acclaimed and cherished. The Protestant
denominations must be aided in every way in their process of recovery of
the good things once thrown away; Episcopalians must be persuaded that
nothing can be wrong that leads souls to Christ, and that therefore they
must cease their opposition to Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament
explicitly for adoration, to such devotions as Benediction and the
Rosary simply because they have not explicit Apostolic sanction, or to
vestments, incense and holy water because certain prescriptive laws
passed four hundred years ago in England have never been repealed. Above
all is it necessary that the Episcopal Church should declare itself
formally for the reinstitution of the seven Catholic sacraments, with
the Mass as the one supreme act of worship, obligatory as the chief
service on Sundays and Holy Days, and both as communion and as
sacrifice. In this connection there is one reform that would I think be
more effective than any other, (except the exaltation of the Holy
Eucharist itself) and that is the complete cessation of the practice of
commissioning lay readers and using them for mission work and clerical
assistance. A mission can be established and made fruitful only on the
basis of the sacraments, and chiefly on those of the Holy Eucharist and
Penance. It is not enough to send a zealous and well intentioned layman
to "a promising mission field" in order that he may read Morning and
Evening Prayer and some sermon already published. What is needed is a
priest to say Mass and hear confessions, and nothing else will serve as
a substitute. How this is to be accomplished, now when the candidates
for Holy Orders are constantly falling off in number, with no immediate
prospect of recovery, is a question. Perhaps we may learn something from
the old custom of ordaining "Mass priests," without cure of souls and
with a commission to celebrate the Holy Mysteries even while they
continue their own secular work in the world. For my own part I am
persuaded that the best solution lies in the establishing of diocesan
monasteries where men may take vows for short terms, and, during the
period of these vows, remain at the orders of the bishop to go out at
any time and anywhere in the diocese and to do such temporary or
periodical mission work as he may direct.

_Unworldliness:_ I have referred to the great falling off in the number
of candidates for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church; the same
phenomenon is apparent in all the Protestant denominations, so far as I
know, but it has not shown itself in the Roman Catholic Church. This
defection parallels the falling-off of membership in the various
churches (except again the Roman Catholic) in proportion to the increase
in population. We are told that the diminution of the ministry is due to
the starvation wages that are paid in the vast majority of cases, and of
course it is true that where a married clergy is allowed, men who
believe they have a calling both to ministerial and to domestic life
will think twice before they follow the call of the first when the
pecuniary returns are such as to make the second impossible, which is,
generally speaking, the situation today. To obviate this difficulty many
religious bodies have recently established pension funds, but even this
form of clerical insurance, together with the increase that has been
effected in clerical stipends, has shown no results in an increase of
students in theological seminaries and in candidates for Orders. The man
who has enough of faith in God and a strong enough call to the ministry
of Christ, will answer the call even if he does think twice before doing
so. The trouble lies, I believe, in the very lack of faith and in a
failure of confidence in organized religion largely brought about by
organized religion itself through the methods it has pursued during the
last two or three generations. There is a widespread belief that it is
compromising with the world; that it is playing fast and loose with
faith and discipline in a vain opportunism that voids it of spiritual
power. Even where distrust does not reach this disastrous conclusion,
there is a growing feeling of repugnance to the methods now being
adopted in high quarters to "sell religion" to the public, as is the
phrase which is sufficient in itself to explain the falling away that
now seems to be in process. The attempt to win unwilling support by the
methods of the "institutional church," the rampant advertising, so
frequently under the management of paid "publicity agents"; the setting
apart of half the Sundays in the year for some one or other special
purpose, usually the raising of money for a specific and frequently
worthy object; the "drives" for millions, the huge and impressive
organizations, "scientifically" conducted, for rounding up lapsed
communicants, or doubtful converts, or cash and pledges for missions, or
pensions, or the raising of clergy stipends; the "Nation-wide Campaign,"
the "Inter-Church World Movement"; these--not to speak of the growing
policy of "making it easy" for the hesitant to "come into the church" by
minimizing unpopular clauses in the Creeds or loosening-up on
discipline, and of attracting "advanced" elements by the advocacy and
exploiting of each new social or industrial or political fad as it
arises--are strong deterrents to those who honestly and ardently hunger
for religion that _is_ religion and neither social service nor "big
business."

Christ said "you _cannot_ serve both God and mammon," and this is one of
the few cases where He stated a moral condition as a fact instead of
indicating the right or the wrong possibility in action. Organized
Christianity has for some time been trying to render this dual service,
and the penalty thereof is now on the world. This consideration seems to
me so important and so near the root of our troubles, and not in the
field of organized religion alone, that I am going to quote at length
from the Rev. Fr. Duffy of the American "Society of the Divine
Compassion." What he has said came to me while I was preparing this
lecture, and it is so much better than anything I could say that for my
present purpose I make it my own.

"To the thoughtful person, and the need of reformation will appeal only
to the thoughtful person, it must on reflection become abundantly
evident that the chief necessity of our times in the religious world is
the recovery of Faith. Probably lack of the true measure of Faith has
been the story of every generation, with few exceptions, in the long
history of Christianity, but there possibly never has been a time when
men talked more of it and possessed less than in our own day. * * * *"

"Christianity is a new thing of splendid vision for each and every
generation of men, unique in its promise and unapproached in its
attraction. And yet how small a factor we have made it in the world's
moulding compared with what it might be. We have not achieved a tiny
part of what we might have achieved, because we lack the essentials of
achievement; Faith and Faith's vision. Obsessed, after centuries of
discussion and persecution, with the notion that faith is made up of
mere belief, we have lost the secret of that victorious power that
overcomes the world, and are weakly dependent upon the world's means for
what spiritual operation we undertake. And so content have we grown with
things as they are, that what they might be comes only as a dream that
passes away quickly with the night; blind to our appalling
money-dependency in modern religion, satisfied that the Kingdom of
Heaven is as nigh to us as is possible under present conditions of
society, we practically have substituted for the theological virtues,
Faith, Hope and Charity, the ascending degrees of belief, resignation,
money. This is partly due to our religious inheritance and partly to
mental and spiritual sloth which dislikes the effort of thinking,
preferring easy acquiescence in conditions that are the resultants of
blinded vision. For dependency upon money is not something merely of the
present, but a condition in the spiritual sphere that is largely a
product of a long past. The really inexcusable thing is our willingness,
in a day of greater light and knowledge, to close our eyes to the true
nature of the unattractive, anaemic thing we _call_ faith, which would
be seen as powerless to achieve at all, if taken out of the soil of
material means in which it has been planted."

He then gives various instances of methods actually put in practice
amongst the churches and denominations which indicate the renunciation
of faith and an exclusive reliance on worldy agencies and he then
continues:

"The Joint Commission on Clergy Pensions, appointed by the General
Convention of 1913, made as the basis for apportionment, not the
services of self-denial of, but the amount of stipend received by, the
clergy eligible for pension, thus penalizing the priest who, for the
love of God, sacrificed a larger income to accept work in the most
needed places where toil is abundant and money scarce. It must be
evident, of course, that the motive of the Commission is not an
endorsement of the blasphemous gospel of Success, by adding penalty to
the self-denying clergy; what is painfully obvious is their apparent
unbounded confidence that there are no clergy sufficiently foolish to
sacrifice stipend at the call of faith's venture! And since the
Armistice, the only real activity in organized religion has been a
series of "drives" for vast sums of money, in most cases professionally
directed.

"A consideration of a few facts such as the forgoing must readily
convince even the most unimaginative person that whatever power faith
might have had in the past, it counts for little today; that its
secrets, its very meaning have been forgotten. Otherwise there could not
be this extraordinary exaggeration of the place of money in spiritual
operation, and the unblushing, tacit admission that mammon, which Christ
so warned against, had been recognized as the master of spiritual
situation, instead of the willing servant and useful adjunct of faith it
was designed to be in the Christian vision. Indeed they all speak of
that, largely unconscious, atmosphere of distrust of God which is so
all-prevailing among Christian people today. If the great, positive vice
of the age is covetousness, the great negative one is distrust of God;
the two invariably go together as parts of a whole--one is the reverse
side of the other--for, it is not that we _must_ not, or _ought_ not,
but that we "_cannot_ serve God and mammon." And this atmosphere is one
in which faith cannot exist, it is stifled, crushed, killed, except it
breathe the pure, sweet air of God, with which it can alone surround
itself when human hearts will.

"It is not surprising that out of such conditions should grow false
values, and that spirituality should be measured by the world's
standard. Thus we have fallen into the vicious habit of adjudging
qualifications for spiritual leadership among the clergy by the amount
of their stipends, and measuring their potentialities for usefulness in
the Kingdom of God by the amount of their yearly incomes; among the
laity, the men of power are ever the men of material means, whom we
permit to play the part of Providence in feeding and sustaining the
Church from large purses, the filling of which will not always bear
close investigation, and the really successful parish is always the one
that, no matter what its spiritual condition, rejoices in abundant
material means. So evident is it that the means of spiritual life have
been so confused with the purely material, that it occasions no surprise
when a neighbourhood having changed from the residence district of the
comparatively well-to-do to the very poor, the vestry feels bound to
consider the moving of the church to a more 'desirable' quarter.

"These, of course, are hard facts to face, and it is not strange that we
should seek to evade them by a false optimism that thinks evil is
eliminated by merely contemplating good. The point is, _they must be
faced,_ and at a time when there is some evidence of a little awakening,
it must more and more force itself into the consciousness of the
thoughtful that the dead spiritual conditions of today are due to the
shifting of faith from God to material things as the means of achieving.
The only hope lies in the apparent unconsciousness of the error. This is
invariably the atmosphere that prevails when ecclesiastical history
repeats itself in corruption; it had been true of more than two or three
generations, though obviously unseen save by a few of those contemporary
with the times, that in Jerusalem, 'the heads thereof judge for reward,
and the priests teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for
money; yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say: Is not the Lord among
us? None evil can come upon us.' Corporate unconsciousness, in greater
or less measure, of these conditions, may influence the degree of guilt,
but never can acquit of the sin. And the cold, naked truth is that today
we stand almost helpless before a world of peculiar problems.

"What is there here to reflect the _power_ and _might_ of Christianity,
such as the early Church, especially, possessed, and subsequent
generations, in times of great faith, really knew so much of--the power
to heal the sick, to cast out devils, to achieve wonders out of Christ's
poverty, to experience the thrilling joy of religion in the ever-abiding
Divine Presence, and witness the marvels of faith in the conquering of
the world? How is it we are no longer able to communicate the secrets to
the suffering world which are able to transmute the people's want into
God's plenty, and attract and hold the hearts of men with the joys of
the Vision Splendid? Why is it that hope has given way to resignation,
that the preaching of forgiveness has been dwarfed by the insistence
upon penalty, that distinct evils in the physical sphere are attributed
to God and, because of that, held up to religious estimation as good;
the day of miracles is regarded as belonging to a far distant past, the
answering of prayer looked upon as the exception instead of the rule,
and the old melody of joy in religion exchanged for the wail of despair
in an interpretation of 'Thy will be done' that is only associated with
human calamity? The reply is as simple as, to the thoughtful person, it
is obvious: we have lost knowledge of a living, vital, conquering faith
that is rooted in God Himself, and have satisfied the hunger of human
sense by placing trust in the things of the earth which we see and
touch, and in so doing lost the power spiritually to achieve.

"Now we can only approach, in the hope of a day of better things, the
great practical and intellectual problems of our times from the
standpoint of faith's recovery, for it is only in their relationship to
faith they can be viewed intelligently by the Christian. And it will be
found that at the root of all our difficulties and all our
negligences--so many of them unconscious--and as the cause of our vain
expediencies and attempts to justify the corporate spiritual situation,
is the absence of vital faith and a _whole_ obedience to which God alone
has conditioned results. We need sorely to reconsider what faith really
is, and when we have recovered in some measure that knowledge of it in
experience, which declared its unspeakable worth in the early Church and
in later periods of ecclesiastical history which stand out before all
others, we shall look back upon our past distrust of God and His
promises with shame and wonderment, and proceed to revise our
cataloguing of spiritual values and degrees of sin. For the really
destructive thing, _before all others,_ is a weakened faith that
compromises in a half obedience to Christ and a search for earthly
props. The work of Satan has even been the prompting of distrust of God
in the human family, just as the work of redemption means so largely the
re-establishing of it in the Person of Jesus Christ. From the first
temptation of man to the present moment, all the forces of evil have
concentrated upon breaking man's trust in God and His promises; every
sin has had that as its ultimate end, and every disaster, ill and trial,
in the world and individual life, is subtly presented by the enemy of
God and man (knowing our haziness of vision), so as to place the
appearances against the Creator in a blind disregard for the created;
just as in the life of the Incarnate Son all the great power of the
forces of darkness were brought to bear unsuccessfully upon the snapping
of His faith in His Father--from the time He was tempted to believe
Himself forgotten, when hungering and physically reduced in the
wilderness after His long fast, until the dreadful cry of dereliction
from the Cross at the very end.

"The call for reformation today, then, is to the doing of things left
undone, the search for and recovery of almost lost spiritual powers that
alone lastingly can achieve for God and hasten man's salvation. And this
requires the venture and daring that breaks from the world, withdraws
from compromise, and that, rightly estimating the character and attitude
of God, refuses longer to believe Him the author of evils we resignedly
accept today by calling them good; and instead, claims the powers of the
Divine promises for the utter destruction of the world's ills by a
strict dependence upon spiritual forces and weapons for the
accomplishment of results. Above all, this means a change and reform in
corporate conduct as the end of repentance, for the present almost total
disregard of the laws and principles of Christian living as given in the
Sermon on the Mount."


These are hard sayings and strong doctrine, but will any one say they
are not true? The weakening of religion, with the consequent decline of
civilization, is ultimately to be traced back to _organized_ religion,
not to religion itself, and still less to any inherent defects in
Christianity. Where organized religion has failed it deserved to fail,
because it countenanced disunion, forsook the saving sacraments, and
finally compromised with worldliness and materialism. With each one of
these false ventures faith began to weaken amongst the mass of people
until at last this, which can always save, and alone can save, ceased to
have either the power or the will to force the organism to conform to
the spirit. If we have indeed accomplished the depth of our fall, then
the time is at hand when we may hope and pray for a new outpouring of
divine grace that will bring recovery.

There are wide evidences that men earnestly desire this. I have already
spoken of the great corporate movements towards unity, and these mean
much even though they may at present take on something of the quality of
mechanism instead of depending on the individual and the grace of God
working in him. The "World Conference on Faith and Order," the just
effected federation of the Presbyterians, Methodists and
Congregationalists in Canada, above all the eirenic manifesto of the
Bishops at the last Lambeth Conference, all indicate a new spirit
working potently in the souls of men. Concrete results are not as yet
conspicuous, but the spirit is there and a beginning has been made. Even
more significant is the wide testimony to the need for definite,
concrete and pervasive religion that is daily given by men whose names
have hitherto been quite dissociated from matters of this kind;
scientists, educators, men of business and men of public life. It may be
testimony in favour of some new invention, some synthetic product of
curious and abnormal ingredients; as a matter of fact it frequently is,
and we confront such remarkable products as Mr. Wells has given us, for
example. The significant thing, however, is the fact of the desire and
the avowal; if we have this I think we may leave it to God to see that
the desire is satisfied in the end by heavenly food and not by the
nostrums of ingenuity. For the same reason we may look without dismay on
certain novel phenomena of the moment. In their divergence from "the
Faith once delivered to the Saints" and left in the keeping of the
Church Christ founded as a living and eternal organism through which His
Spirit would work forever, they are wrong and therefore they cannot
endure, but each testifies to the passionate desire in man for religion
as a reality, and no one of them comes into existence except as the
result of desperate action by men to recover something that had been
taken from them and that their souls needed, and would have at any cost.
Each one of these strange manifestations is a reaction from some old
error that had become established belief or custom. No one who holds to
historic Christianity is interested in them, but those who have found
religion intellectualized beyond endurance and transformed either by
materialism or rationalism, seek for the mysticism they know to be a
reality (to employ a paradox) in the ultra mysticism of Oriental cults;
those who revolt against the exaggeration of evil and its exaltation to
eminence that rivals that of God Himself, which is the legacy of one
powerful movement in the Reformation, rush to the other extreme and deny
the existence of evil and even the reality of matter, while spiritism,
the most insidious, perilous and fatal of all the spiritual temptations
that beset the world at this time, gains as its adherents those who have
been deprived of the Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints and have
been forbidden to pray for the dead or to ask for their prayers and
intercessions.

However strange and erroneous the actual manifestation, there is no
question as to the reality and prevalence of the desire for the recovery
of spiritual power through the channels of religion. It shows itself, as
it should, first of all in the individual, and it is only recently that
organized religion, Catholic or Protestant, has begun to show a
sympathetic consciousness and to take the first hesitant steps towards
meeting the demand. Because of this the seekers for reality have been
left unshepherded and have wandered off into strange wildernesses. The
call is now to the churches, to organized religion, and if the call is
heeded our troubles are well on the road to an end. If the old way of
jealousy, hatred and fear is maintained, then humanly speaking, our case
is hopeless. If the older way of brotherhood, charity and
loving-kindness is followed the future is secure in the Great Peace.
Nothing is wrong that leads men to Christ, and this is true from the
Salvation Army at one end of the scale to the Seven Sacraments of
Catholicity at the other. The world demands now not denial but
affirmation, not protest and division but the ringing "Credo" of
Catholic unity.




VIII


PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

    Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of
    Hosts.

We have tried to approach each subject in this course of lectures in the
spirit of peace, and the greatest contributory factor in the achieving
of the Great Peace is the individual himself, on whom, humanly speaking,
rests the final responsibility. "Not by might, nor by power, but by My
Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." Not by majestical engines and curious
devices and mass-action, nor yet by an imposed human authority enforced
by arms and the law, but by the Holy Spirit of God working through the
individual soul and compelling the individual will. Peace is one of the
promised fruits of the Holy Spirit, and like the others is manifested
through human lives; therefore on us rests the preëminent responsibility
of showing forth in ourselves, first of all, those things we desire for
others and for society.

We have experienced the Great War, we endure its aftermath, and amidst
the perils and dangers that follow both there is none greater than that
which attaches to exterior war, viz., that the attention of both
combatants is focussed on the faults and the weaknesses and the crimes
of the opponent, with the result that both become destructive critics
rather than constructive examples. Chesterton rightly says, "What is
wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself * * * rather
he identifies himself with the ideal." Seeing evil in others and
flattering one's self is the antithesis of the spirit that would lead to
the Great Peace, for in that spirit the field of warfare is transferred
from the external to the internal, and the interior contest, which alone
establishes lasting results, necessitates a recognition of our own error
and the need of amendment of our own life.

If our modern devices have failed; if the things we invented with a high
heart and high hope, in government, industry, society, education,
philosophy have in the end brought disappointment, disillusionment, even
despair, it is less because of their inherent defects than because the
individual failed, and himself ceased to act as the sufficient channel
for the divine power which alone energizes our weak little engines and
which acts through the individual alone. There is no better
demonstration of this essential part played by the personal life of man
than the fact that God, for the redemption of the world, took on human
form and became one Man amongst many men. There is no better
demonstration of the fact that it is through the personal lives of
individuals that the Great Peace is to be achieved, both directly and
indirectly, than the fact that peace, the gift of the Holy Spirit, was
promised to the individual man, by Christ Himself, as the legacy he left
to his disciples after His Resurrection and Ascension. Since then the
world has been under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the "Guide and
Comforter" that was promised, even though it has blindly and from time
to time rejected the guidance and therefore known not the comfort. The
Old Law of "Thou shalt not" was followed by the New Law of "Thou shalt,"
and this in turn by the law of the third Person of the Trinity which
does not supersede the dispensations of the Father and of the Son, but
fulfills them in that it affords the spiritual power, if we will, to
abide by the inhibitions and to carry out the commands.

Our search is for peace, the Great Peace, "the Peace of God which
passeth all understanding," and we shall achieve this for ourselves and
for the world only through ourselves as individuals, and so for the
society of which we are a part, and in so far as we bring ourselves into
contact with the Spirit of God. There is deep significance in the fact
that the first time Christ used the salutation "Peace be unto you," was
after His resurrection. It would seem that this special gift of the Holy
Spirit had to be withheld from man until after the human life of God the
Son had been brought to an end in accomplishment, for He says "Peace I
leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I
unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." "It
is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter
will not come unto you: but if I depart I will send Him unto you. When
He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth." "Ye
shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you."

It is the spirit that quickeneth. After God had revealed the Law and
given to us the great redeeming and atoning Life, He saw that we had
need of a further manifestation before we should be able to keep the law
and live the life. Therefore the Holy Spirit was sent to quicken us and
give us power to do what we had both heard and seen. Today we accept the
moral law, we recognize the perfection of Chirst's life, but we need to
be reminded again that the power to be "sons of God" is present with us
if we will but use it. As this power is a spirit it can only be
apprehended spiritually; when our minds and hearts are set on material
things, even on good material things, the "still small voice" of the
spirit remains unheard: but if we listen first to that inward voice and
then use the means of grace afforded us, we are enabled to lift up our
hearts and minds to the Creator and then to use in His service all the
material universe which is also His creation. We can not get a right
philosophy by working for right philosophy, but only by living in the
right relationship as individuals: then as a by-product of religion a
right philosophy will come. We can not get a right industrial system by
searching for a right industrial system, but if we show forth in our
lives the Christian virtues, a right industrial system will come as one
of the by-products of religion. So with each one of our so-called
"problems." Life rightly lived has no problems. This is a hard saying
for an intellectual age whose temptation is to trust in its own power
rather than in the power of God, but "except ye become as little
children" and walk by faith and not by sight the Kingdom of God is
withheld. A soldier who suffered in the late war, and out of his
suffering found peace, says, "Christ's hardest work is to teach the
wise: Those who are entrusted with authority and responsibility will be
the least prepared to make the venture of the Spirit, however much they
may believe in it. They are sacrificing least now: they will have to
sacrifice most when the Spirit comes. They have so much to unlearn:
children and working men have so little. The whole of our world today is
rooted and grounded in intellect. Our machinery, our institutions, our
great systems, the entire body of enterprise is governed by brains. It
is this that will alter. Just behind intellect there is a vision that is
purer, keener, more powerful than the vision of your eyes, than the
hearing of your ears, than the touch of your hands. This world is being
transformed into another which comes into being at our spiritual touch.
The world needs something personal, something from the heart. It is sick
to death with the cold machinery of the intellect. But before men see
this they must change their view of life, they must _be born again._ The
scientists, the historians and theologians, the philosophers, have made
the universe too big. It is not a big place: it is very tiny. Life is so
simple, really. Our wise men have made it so difficult, so ugly. It is
only children who can see the risen Christ; children, perhaps, out of
whom seven devils have been cast. The world needs not critics, but
teachers, and children are waiting everywhere to teach, but men,
shutting the windows of their souls, try rather to mould these little
ones to fit into the vacant spaces of their own stupid world. Are not
children the true artists? They won't tolerate anything but Beauty. They
see Beauty everywhere, not because it is there, but because they want it
there. Everything they touch turns into something far more precious than
gold: every word they utter is a song of praise. You are almost in
heaven every time you look into the eyes of a child." Remember, please,
these are the words of a man who has faced the horrible realities of
modern warfare, and so do not dismiss them as mere poetry, or with
Nicodemus' question, "How can a man be born again?", but listen to a
modern interpretation of the answer to that question:--("The Life
Indeed.") "We must be born again even to see the spiritual kingdom, must
be born of water and the spirit to enter its gates at all. So to his
little audience of disciples Our Lord says it is not an affair of
legislation, of discovery, of which men say, 'Lo here, lo there! but the
kingdom of heaven is _within you._ Why a second birth? This is a second
birth because it must needs supervene at a point where two elements can
work together, the element of an appealing, vitalizing spirit from the
unseen and the element of free human choice. Being of the spirit, it is
the birth into freedom: it is the soul emerging from its prison into the
open air of liberty and light and life." Note the element of free
choice. Our first birth is outside our choice and the gifts are
unconditioned; our second birth, when again we become as little
children, demands our response to the Holy Spirit and our persevering
cooperation with Him to make His influence effectual for ourselves and
for the "communion of saints" and the corporate religion into which the
Spirit also baptizes us. In a recent sermon a bishop of the Episcopal
Church says, "This is the creed of the Church--the Divine Father and
Forgiveness: the Divine Son and Redemption: the Divine Spirit and
Abundant Life. Therefore the Church still insists upon the creation of
moral rectitude and spiritual character as the end and purpose of
religion, aye, as the basic problem underlying all questions relating to
human life--social, industrial, civic, and political. The Church still
preaches the gospel of the Grace of God, the obligation and blessing of
worship, the meaning and virtue of the Christian Sacraments." Also "My
brethren, we shall not be content to criticize and find fault with our
own age and time, but rather we shall pray for the power to see within
its questionings, unrest and discontent--aye, its recklessness and
apparent failures--the strivings of the Spirit of God. But each man has
to voice for himself the conviction of the reality of the spiritual
order and the spiritual life. Therefore, let us believe in and practice
the worship of God, 'praying always' as St. Paul says, 'with all prayer
and supplication in the Spirit,' or as St. Jude says, 'building up
yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.'"

Let us accept this suggestion and try to find in the unrest of our own
time evidences of "the strivings of the Spirit of God," waiting our
perception and response. The soldier of the Great War, having faced
death and imprisonment and suffering in many forms says, "compared with
the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow." The first evidence
of good in our own day is the almost universal discontent with evils and
the desire to find a better way. The humility which recognizes that so
widespread a condition cannot be the fault of any one nation or group
but is rather the responsibility of each one of us, is cause for hope.
Some of us believe that war can breed only war, hatred only hatred; that
governments cannot make peace, but can only cause cessation of open
hostilities, and that the real peace, the Great Peace, must await the
action of the Spirit. This Spirit, of love and forgiveness, breeds love
and forgiveness, indeed is far more potent than the spirit of hate.
Because of this very strength and potency its evidences are not so
immediately apparent, but they are deeper-rooted. Perhaps in this
material sphere we human beings must see, and to a certain extent
experience, hate, before we can really know love, and consciously and
freely choose it. When that choice is made, when we, knowing all that
hate and evil and malice can accomplish, yet deliberately choose to love
our enemies, we have slain the Adversary and made hate and evil
powerless. Of course we have not power of ourselves to do this but only
through the grace of God. When we try God's way, not waiting for the
other person to reform or to be generous or to speak gently or to
forgive, then and only then do we deserve the name of Christians; then
and only then are we walking in love; then and only then are we really
praying effectually "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it
is in Heaven." We have tried the way of the world, the way of reprisals,
the way of distrust, and, thank God, we are none of us satisfied with
the results. Perhaps now we may be ready to try the way of God by making
the great adventure of faith, each one in his own person; faith in
himself and faith in the future. The way of the world has bred fear that
has issue in hate, and hate that has issue in fear; but the better way,
that of faith, breeds trust that has issue in fellowship, and fellowship
that has issue in trust. There is no problem of labour, of politics, of
society that is insoluble if once it is approached in the spirit of
faith and fellowship and trust, but none of these is susceptible of
solution where the controlling motives are hate, distrust and fear. The
modern policy of centralization and segregation has resulted in dealing
with men as groups and not as individuals. When, for example, iron-bound
cults (they are no less than this) meet as "capital" and as "labour,"
both merge the individuality of their members in a thing which has no
real or necessary existence but is an artificial creation of thought
operating under the dominion of ephemeral, almost accidental conditions.
As a member of an "interest" or a cult, where humanity and personality
are, so to speak, "in commission," a man does not hesitate to do those
things he would never think of doing for himself, knowing them to be
selfish, cruel, unjust and uncharitable. A case in point--if we need
one, which is hardly probable since they are of daily occurrence--is the
pending contest between the mine operators and mine workers in Great
Britain, where both parties, with Government thrown in, are guilty of
maintaining theories and perpetrating acts for which an individual would
be, even now, excoriated and outlawed. The Irish imbroglio is another
instance of the same kind.

In a personal letter from a consulting engineer who has had unusual
opportunities, by reason of his official position, to come closely in
contact with the conditions governing industry and finance both in
America and Europe since the war, I find this illuminating statement of
a matured judgment. "As a practical matter, and facing the issue, I
would preach the practice of de-centralization in government and
business which will in time develop the individual and accomplish the
desired end. * * * Decentralization should be carried to such an extent
that the units of business would be of such size that the head could
again have a personal relation with each individual associated with him.
* * * With the personal relation again established, unionism as at
present practiced would again be unnecessary, and the unions would
become once more guilds for the development and advancement of the
individual." It is this nullification of the human element, of the
person as such, the introduction of the gross aggregate with its
artificial corporate quality, and the attempt to establish a
correspondence between these unnatural things, the whole being
intensified by the emotions of fear, distrust and hate, which produces
the contemporary insistence on "rights" and the rank injustice, cruelty
and disorder that follow the blind contest. To quote again from the
soldier who achieved illumination through the recent war, "My friends,
there is no protection of rights in heaven. When we speak of rights we
are blinded by the light of this world of rule and order and
intellectual conceits. It is not justice we need, it is mercy."

If we honestly endeavour to bring about something more nearly
approaching the Kingdom of God on earth, we should do well to achieve a
little more of the quality of child-like trust which knows that through
the petition to father or mother, or to a guardian angel, or directly to
God, the result will surely follow. We long passionately to see a good,
_our_ good as we see it, accepted here and now, but whatever we offer,
no mater how righteous or how salutary, is but a small part of the great
good, a limited and partial showing forth of only one element, while the
final and comprehensive good is the result of many contributions, and in
the end is not ours, but God's, and by His overruling providence it may
look very unlike what we had predetermined and anticipated. Moreover,
the condition even of our own small good becoming effective, is _faith,_
and neither sight nor action. There is a faith that can move mountains,
and it is faith in fellowship, in the underlying, indestructible good in
man, above all in the desire and the intent of God to deal mercifully
with us and beyond the dictates of justice and the claims of our own
deserts. When we know and accept this power of faith, placing it above
the efficiency of our own feeble works, then indeed we may become the
patient, hopeful, joyful and faithful Christians we were intended to be,
and therefore the creators of the spirit of peace. Nothing permanent can
be achieved except in coöperation with God; any work of man alone (or of
the devil) has in it the seed of decay and must perish, This knowledge
relieves us of the gloomy responsibility of destroying or trying to
destroy every evil thing we see or think we see. If it is really evil it
is already dying unless nourished by evil within ourselves. Here is a
Buddhist legend which has a lesson for each of us--"The watcher in the
shrine of Buddha rushed in to the Holy Fathers one morning with tidings
of a horrible demon who had usurped the throne of our Lord Buddha. The
Fathers ran to the throne room, each one more infuriated than the other,
and declaimed against the insolence of the demon, who grew huger and
more hideous at every angry word that hurtled through the air. At last
arrived the oldest and most saintly of the monks and threw himself on
his knees before the demon and said, "We thank thee, O Master, for
teaching us how much anger and wrath and jealousy was still hidden in
our hearts." At every word he said, the demon grew smaller and smaller
and at last vanished. He was am Anger-Eating Demon, and anger-rousing
words and even thoughts of ill-feeling nourished him.

The belief that in comparison with the depth of good in the world the
evil is shallow may also be expressed in the statement that God is Lord
of Eternity while the devil is prince only of this world. As this evil
spirit has power, and as a part of this power is the ability to appear
as an angel of light, so to deceive us, we are bound by
self-examination, constantly indulged in, to scrutinize those things, so
common in our own lives we do not notice them, which may be but the
illusions of this spirit of darkness showing as a fictitious spirit of
light: Hurry and carelessness both in thought and in action;
snap-judgment at short range; compromise with the spirit of the time in
the interest of "good business," "practical considerations" or "sound
policy"; worship of the doctrine of "get results," acceptance of the
horrible principle: that it is every man's business to "sell" something
to another, from a patent medicine or "gilt edged" bonds to a new
philosophy or an old religion; the estimating of values by size, number,
cost. It is common parlance among Christian people to speak of what a
man "is worth" meaning how much money he has. We speak of a man's
"making a living" meaning only how much money he makes, when by making
only money he would be killing his living. Do we not speak of the call
of a missionary from an unshepherded flock to a large city parish as a
call to "a wider sphere of usefulness"? When you or I conceive of any
piece of work as "important" is it not because it involves either great
numbers or great sums of money? Then we hear much today of the need for
leaders. The need could not be exaggerated, but does not this lack
exist, in part, because we have forgot that the Christian's first duty
is to be a follower, and that only from amongst real followers can God
(not man, least of all the man himself) raise up a leader? These are
small matters, you may say, but "straws show which way the wind blows,"
and the spirit, like the wind, manifests itself first in small matters.
Every life is made up largely of small things, "the little, nameless
unremembered acts of kindness and of love" which some one has called
"the noblest portion of a good man's life."

With this brief glance at some of the possible manifestations of the
spirit of evil which we believe to be temporary and therefore of
secondary importance only, let us consider some of the requisites of the
Christian life as exemplified in the life of Christ, especially those of
which we need to be reminded today. We have already spoken of that
child-likeness which takes the faith simply and applies it to the common
things of daily life--Christ's life of ministry, of good works (which
was, in proportion to the time given to preparation for activity and
preaching, of very short duration), full of injunctions to those who
were with him to "tell no man"; therefore the good works which are done
"in His likeness" must not be done in public. If we are "seen of men,"
verily we have our reward. Christ's life ended in apparent failure, in
ignominious death on the cross. The world worships today's success and
immediate publicity, the Christian, to be worthy of his Lord, must
accept apparent failure and must offer his best work in secret: "And my
Father which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly." A touching poem
of Francis Thompson's pictures the marveling of a soul on his rewards in
Paradise which, in his humility, he thinks undeserved. The man asks of
God:

  _O when did I give Thee drink erewhile,
     Or when embrace Thine unseen feet?
   What gifts Thee give for my Lord Christ's smile,
     Who am a guest here most unmeet?_

and is answered

  _When thou kissedest thy wife and children sweet
    (Their eyes are fair in my sight as thine)
   I felt the embraces on My feet.
    (Lovely their locks in thy sight and Mine.)_

A necessary reminder of the fact that for each of us, charity, which is
love, begins at home, and that we love and serve God best in His holy
human relationships--if we love not our brother whom we have seen how
can we love God whom we have not seen?

Again, the individual Christian life must, like its Great Original,
suffer for others. When we suffer as a result of our own wrongdoing we
are but meeting our just reward; but if patiently and humbly and
voluntarily we bear pain, even unto death, for others, we are
transcending justice, the pagan law, and exemplifying mercy, the
Christian virtue. No sensitive soul in this generation, conscious of the
sacrifice of the millions of young lives who "stormed Heaven" in their
willingness to die that others might live, can doubt this. The essence
of love is sacrifice; voluntary, nay eager sacrifice. Before our Blessed
Lord died He was mocked and ridiculed, He suffered physical hardship,
falling under the weight of the cross, and He was lifted up, crucified,
to suffer the ignominious death of a felon. He was made a spectacle for
the jests and laughter of the multitude. In our own time and amongst
ourselves, except for periods of war, there is little necessity for
physical suffering for our faith, but the need to endure ridicule is as
great as ever, perhaps even greater because of the absence of physical
suffering. Since we are trying to apply these things in small and simple
ways to the individual life let us each one consider how much moral
courage it takes to defend Christian virtues when they are sneered at
under the guise of "jokes." Let us exercise charity by not quoting
instances, but let us be watchful of our laughter and our fellowship,
which are both gifts of God, and see that we do not confuse pagan
pleasure with Christian joy, the evil sneer with the tender recognition
of the absurd in ourselves and in others. It is Mr. Chesterton again who
points out the fact that the pagan virtues of justice and the like which
he calls the "sad virtues" were superseded, when the great Christian
revelation came, by the "gay and exuberant virtues," the virtues of
grace, faith, hope and charity; and who says, "the pagan virtues are the
reasonable virtues, and the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity
are in their essence as unreasonable as they can be. Charity means
pardoning what is unpardonable or it is no virtue at all. Hope means
hoping when things are hopeless or it is no virtue at all. And faith
means believing the incredible or it is no virtue at all." If you say
this is a paradox I reply: it must be so, since it requires faith to
accept a paradox. The realm of reason is the one in which we walk by
sight, and of this fact our age in its pride of intellect has need to be
reminded. If Christ be not the Son of God, and His revelation of the
"faith once delivered" be not the divine and final guide, fulfilling,
completing and at the same time reversing every other ethic, religion
and moral code, then these things be indeed foolishness, for there is no
explaining them on the ground of logic or philosophy. But if, by the
gift of grace, we have faith, we remember "I thank Thee, Father, that
Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed
them unto babes: even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight."

Again, and if as persons we are to grow in relationship to a personal
God, we must both speak and listen to our Father; in other words we must
use the great dynamic of prayer. "More things are wrought by prayer than
this world dreams of." We are told that one of the requisites of the
really good talker is to be a good listener; the apparently good talker
is in reality a monologuist. In our prayer-life today do we recognize
sufficiently the need for _listening_ to God? We are perhaps ready
enough to ask for blessings and mercies, but that is only a part of the
full life of prayer which must include also thanksgiving, lifting of the
heart and mind, and quiet listening or interior prayer. There was an age
in the world when this interior prayer was so much more joyful and
natural a thing than the world of matter that it had to be taught "to
labour is to pray." Today, when we accept the necessity of labour, and
even worship activity for its own sake, do we not need to be reminded
that to pray is to labour? If you doubt this, try to make that
concentrated form of prayer known as meditation, out of which springs a
resolve and determination to do better; try to do this faithfully for
fifteen minutes a day and it may prove the hardest work you have ever
undertaken. A great servant of God has said, "I believe no soul can be
lost which faithfully practices meditation for fifteen minutes a day."
Nor must we forget that in this work of prayer we are companioned by the
Holy Spirit, the Peace-maker, Who maketh intercession for us "with
groanings which can not be uttered" and "Who leads us ever gently but
surely into that closer communion with God whose result is life more
abundant." After prayer it is easier to realize that "to be spiritually
minded is life and peace"; it is easier to obey the injunction "And
grieve not the Holy Spirit of God whereby ye are sealed unto the day of
redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and
evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice, and be ye kind one
to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for
Christ's sake, hath forgiven you." And for those that seek after peace
it must be _all_ wrath, _all_ anger and _all_ evil speaking which are
put away: This leaves no room for what the world calls "just wrath"
"righteous anger," or speaking evil of evil doers. Let us call to mind
the incident in the early life of St. John, afterwards the great
disciple of love, when he wanted to call down wrath on the wicked
inhabitants of a city and was rebuked by Our Lord who said, "Ye know not
in what spirit ye speak." After love had supplanted wrath, and the good
spirit had taken the place of the evil in St. John's heart, he was sent
to convert the people he would have destroyed. Yes, it is the spirit
that matters, the wrath that is wrong and that must be put away before
we can love God or our neighbour as ourself, for the fruit of the Spirit
is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
meekness, temperance.

When we understand that the object of life and of education is the
creation of a spirit and not the doing of things, we are freed from the
tyranny of results in this world as a final test and come to realize
that judgment belongs only to God Who as a Spirit judges the effort.

Of course this does not mean that we are freed from the moral law, that
certain evil things in ourselves and in others are not always the
results of an evil spirit, but rather that in addition to avoiding and
shunning those things which are obviously evil, we must with equal care
avoid doing even good things in a bad spirit. The commandments still
stand, the moral law is abated not one jot, but in Christianity and in
Christianity alone are we given power to fulfill the law and to add the
new commandment, the summing up of them all, of love to God and man. No
human soul comes into the world without some desire to be good, because
each human soul is a child of God. To each one, not blinded by pride
(and surely it should be easy in these days to be humble) comes, sooner
or later, the realization of his own inability of himself to do what he
would, the need for a power outside himself, the power which is
available and of which we have heard "I am come that ye might have life
and more abundantly." Let us examine how the apostles set about living
this abundant life. In Dr. Genung's "The Life Indeed" we read, "One and
all they made it a matter of the spirit that is the man, but the spirit
they recognized was not an abstraction, or a theory, but a present
Person and helper who was witnessing with their spirits. St. John makes
the matter equally definite: 'The Son of God,' he says, 'was manifest
that he might destroy the works of the Devil,' and St. Paul, mindful of
the inner subtleties of the conflict, warns his readers that Satan has
changed his tactics and has transformed himself into an angel of light.
I am not sure that we have gained greatly by letting our notions of
spiritual life grow dim and abstract. Perhaps for this very reason the
rebellious, negative, designing spirit that is so prone to invade the
hearts of us all is the more free to gain a foot-hold and go about
controlling the tone of our life. There is real advantage in bringing
the large issues of life to a point where not only our mind but, as it
were, our senses, can lay hold on them. It is the impulse of
simple-minded men like those early disciples, and if we continue
straight-seeing we do not outgrow it. What makes these views of life so
deep is not that they are less simple than those of others, but that
they are more simple. To St. John the reality that has come to win the
world is not the promise of salvation, or prophecy of an eventual life
eternal, but just life without modification or limitation, life
absolute, full-orbed, pulsating through worlds seen and unseen alike. 'I
am the Life,' he makes Christ say, not, 'I am working to secure it.' St.
John it is who preserves to us that conception of eating the Flesh and
drinking the Blood of the Son of Man. No philosopher in the world, we
may roundly say, would ever have put it so, and yet how effectually is
thus revealed what it means to get the power of the new life thoroughly
incorporated with our blood and breath. He it is who identifies the most
inner values of life with the simplest acts and experiences, reducing it
to terms of eating bread and drinking water, and walking in daylight,
and bearing fruit like the branches of a vine and following like sheep
the voice of a shepherd, and entering a door and finding pasture."

Let us cease trying materialistic and intellectual means for supplying
the power to live the spiritual life and let us each one establish the
needful relationship with the true source of power. May our time not be
likened to the Oriental traveler, who, appreciating the convenience and
force of electricity as seen in a room he occupied, fitted his palace,
on his return, with a set of elaborate fixtures and was surprised to
find no illumination therefrom! We are torches who can not shine in
themselves, but who, when connected with the great central Source of
Power, the Blessed Trinity in its three glorious manifestations, can
show forth the light of the world. Christians should be torch bearers,
and the true torch bearer lights not his own path so much as the path of
those who come after him. And this brings us to the fundamental reason
for personal responsibility. Our motive in seeking personal
righteousness it not, as might hastily be thought, because of a selfish
desire to save our own souls, or to withdraw either here or hereafter
from other souls, but for "their sakes" to sanctify ourselves; for the
lives we live today create the spiritual atmosphere of tomorrow.

From Spain come the following suggestive thoughts in regard to the value
of the person. "The individual is the real purpose of the universe. We
may seek the hero of our thought in no philosopher who lived in flesh
and blood, but in a being of fiction and of action, more real than all
the philosophers. He is Don Quixote. One cannot say of Don Quixote that
he was strictly idealistic. He did not fight for ideas: he was of the
spirit and he fought for the spirit. Quixotism is a madness descended
from the madness of the cross; therefore it is despised by reason; Don
Quixote will not resign himself to either the world or its truth, to
science or logic, to art or aesthetics, to morals or ethics. And what
did he leave behind him? one may ask. I reply that he left himself, and
that a man, a man living and immortal, is worth all theories and all
philosophies. Other countries have left us institutions and books: Spain
has left soul. St. Theresa is worth all institutions whatever, or any
'Critique of Pure Reason.'"

Yes, this is I think the lesson we have to learn, now at this turning
point in history with the epoch of intellect crumbling about our ears,
and the great World's Fair of multiplied, ingenious mechanisms we have
called "modern civilization" at a point of practical bankruptcy. It is
the spirit that counts, the soul of "man living and immortal," and only
through our own living, and the spiritual force that we can command, and
through ourselves apply, shall we be able to compass that social
regeneration that is the only alternative to social degeneration and
catastrophe. The man who does not live his belief is powerless to redeem
or to create, though he were a Solon, a Charlemagne, a Napoleon or a
Washington; the man who lives his belief, even if he is a mill-hand in
Fall River, is contributing something of energizing force to the task of
re-creation. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the
Lord of Hosts."

Fantastic and paradoxical as it may seem to link together Don Quixote
and St. Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept
them as models. The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and
self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders
still stands before us heroic in his childlike refusal of compromise,
his burning compassion, his deafness to ridicule. In a sense we must all
be ready to accept the jeering and the scorn that were poured out on the
Knight of La Mancha, if like him we are to fight, even foolishly, for
the things that are worth fighting for--either that they may be
destroyed, or restored. And with St. Theresa we must be willing to
endure obloquy, suspicion, malice, if like her we live in faith,
subjecting our will to the divine will, and then sparing nothing of
ourselves in the labour of saving the world for God in the twentieth
century as St. Theresa laboured to save it in the sixteenth century.

The call today is for personal service through the right living that
follows the discovery of a right relationship to God. Not a campaign but
a crusade; and the figures of St. Louis and St. Francis and St. Theresa,
together with all the Knights and Crusaders of Christendom, rise up
before us to point the way. We would find the Great Peace, the world
would find the Great Peace also, but

  _The way is all so very plain
  That we may lose the way._

We have been told: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you, for your
Heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of these things." If we go forth on
this new and knightly quest--quest indeed in these latter days, for the
Holy Grail, lost long since and hidden away from men--we may, by the
grace of God, achieve. Then, "suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye," and
before we are aware, for "the Kingdom of God cometh not with watching,"
we and even the world, shall find that we have compassed the Great
Peace, and if we do not live to see it, yet in our "certain hope" we
shall know that it will come, if not in our time, yet in God's good
time; if not in our way, yet in His more perfect way.

In these lectures I have from time to time, and perhaps beyond your
patience, criticised and condemned many of those concrete institutions
which form the working mechanism of life, even suggesting possible
substitutes. In ending I would say as in beginning; this is not because
salvation may be found through any device, however perfect, but because
this itself, by reason of its excellence on the one hand or its
depravity on the other, is, under the law of life, contributory to the
operation of the divine spirit (which is the sole effective energy) or a
deterrent. I have tried at long last to gather up this diffuse argument
for the supremacy of spiritual force as it works through the individual,
and to place it before you in this concluding lecture. Perhaps I can
best emphasize my point thus.

The evil of the institutions which now hold back the progress that must
be made towards social recovery and the Great Peace, is far less the
quality of wrongness in themselves and the ill influence they put in
operation, than it is the revelation they make of personal character. It
is not so much that newspapers are what they are as that there should be
men who are pleased and content to make them this, in apparently honest
ignorance of what they are doing, and that there should be others in
sufficient number to make them profitable business propositions by
giving them their appreciation and support. It is not so much that
government should be what it is as that character should have so far
degenerated in the working majority of citizens that these qualities
should show themselves as a fixed condition, and that there should be no
body of men of numerical distinction, who regard the situation with
sentiments much more active than those of indifference and amused
toleration. It is not so much that the industrial situation should be
what it is, as that there should be on both sides moral wrong, and that
this condition could not have come about, nor could it still be
maintained, except through character degeneration in the individual. It
is not so much that many forms of religion are what they are, as it is
that they should progressively have become this through their exponents
and adherents, and that there should be so many who are still willing to
defend them in this case.

Every ill thing reveals through its very quality the defects of the
individual man, and as upon him must rest the responsibilities for the
fault, so on him must be placed the responsibility for the recovery. The
failures we have recorded, the false gods we have raised up in idolatry,
even the Great War itself, are revelations of failure in personal and
individual character. We may recognize this, but recognition is not
enough. We may found societies and committees and write books and
deliver lectures, but corporate action is not enough, nor intellectual
assent. There is but one way that is right, sufficient and effective,
and that is the right living of each individual, which is the
incarnation and operation of faith by the grace of God.

It is my desire to close this course of lectures not with my own words
but with those of one of the great personalities revealed by the war.
First, however, I wish to say this. If there is any thought or word in
what I have said that seems to you true, then I ask you to use it not as
a matter for discussion but as an impulse toward personal action. If
there is anything that is of the nature of explicit error, then I pray
that the Spirit of Truth may make deaf your ears that you hear not, and
blot out of your memory the record of what I have said. If there is
anything that is not consonant with the Christian religion, as this has
been revealed to the world and as it is guarded and interpreted by the
Church to which these powers were committed, then I retract and disavow
it explicitly and _ex animo._

There are two great spiritual figures that have been revealed to us
through the Great War: Cardinal Mercier, the great confessor, who held
aloft the standard of spiritual glory through the war itself, and Bishop
Nicholai of Serbia who has testified to eternal truth and righteousness
in the wilderness the war has brought to pass. It is with his inspired
words that I will make an ending of the things I have been impelled to
say.

"Christ is merciful, but at last He comes as the Judge. * * * He comes
now not to preside in the churches only but to be in your homes, in your
shops, to be everywhere with you. He wants to be first; He has become
last in Europe, * * * Civilization passes like the winds, but the soul
remains. Christianization is the only good and constructive
civilization. Americanization without Christianization means Bolshevism.
Europe is suffering today for her sins. Christ has forgiven seventy
times seven, and now it seems that He is the Judge, turning away,
rejected, leaving Europe and going through the gate of Serbia to Asia.
Pray for us. * * * Send us not your gold and silver for food so much as
send us converted men. Convert your politicians, your members of the
press, your journalists, to preach Christ.

"Christ is choosing the perfect stones, the marble of all the churches,
to complete His mystical body in Heaven. He thinks only of one Church,
made from those true to Him of all the churches here. Civilizations are
moving pictures, made by man. Without God they perish. The soul, the
spirit, lives. The war is not against externals; the war is against
ourselves."




APPENDIX A


From the point attained in the lecture on "A Working Philosophy," a
point I believe to be clearly indicated by Christian philosophy and
sharply differentiated from that of paganism or modernism, I would
adventure further and even into a field of pure theory where I can
adduce no support or justification from any other source. Speculation
along this line may be dangerous, even unjustifiable; certainly it
introduces the peril of an attempt to intellectualize what cannot be
apprehended by the intellectual faculty, an effort which has been the
obsession of modernism and has resulted in spiritual catastrophe. On the
other hand we are confronted by a definite and plausible system worked
out by those who were without fear of these consequences, and while this
already is losing something of its common acceptance, it is still
operative, indeed is the only working system and consistent theory of
the majority of thinking men outside the limits of Catholicism. I think
it wrong both in its assumptions and its inferences, and it certainly
played a deplorable part in the building up of the latest phase of
modern civilization, while its persistence is, I am persuaded, a barrier
to recovery or advance. This theory, which has gradually been deduced
from the wonderful investigations, tabulations and inferences of Darwin,
Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and others of the great group of British
intellectuals and scientists of the nineteenth century, is known under
the general title of Evolution.

The following suggestions are offered with extreme diffidence, and only
as uncertain and indeterminate approximations. In some respects they
seem not inconsistent with the most recent scientific research which
already is casting so much doubt on many of the assumed factors behind
evolution and on the accepted methods of its operation. The true
solution, if it is found, will result from the cooperation of
scientists, philosophers and theologians, illuminated by the fire of the
Divine Wisdom--Hagia Sophia--for in such a problem as this, almost the
final secret of the Cosmos, no single human agency acting alone can hope
to achieve the final revelation, while all acting together could hardly
escape falling into "the falsehoods of their own imaginings" if they
relied solely on their unaided efforts in the intellectual sphere.

Assuming then that life is an enduring process of the redemption of
matter through the interpenetration of spirit, what is a possible method
of action? To explain what I mean I must use a diagrammatic figure, but
I admit this must be not only inadequate but misleading, for instead of
the two dimensions of a diagram, we must postulate three, with time
added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well.
Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided
into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the
region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy of the
universe, the unconditioned Absolute, in the terms of Christian
theology, Almighty God. The second is the plane of matter, an area of
potential, but in itself inert and indeterminate. The third is the space
of what we call life in all its forms, the area in which the
transformation and redemption take place. The fourth is the ultimate
unknowable, that is to say, that which follows on after life and
receives the finished product of redemption.

[Illustration: DIAGRAM NO. 1. The interpenetration of Matter by Spirit.
_x,_ The primary Unknowable; _x',_ the ultimate Unknowable; _[Greek:
alpha],_ the plane of Matter; _[Greek: beta],_ the plane of Life.]

Now there is eternally in process a penetration of the stratum of matter
by jets of the _élan vital_ from the realm of pure spirit, each as it
were striving to detach from the plane of matter some small portion,
which is transformed in its passage through life and achieves entrance
into the ultimate unknowable, when the process of redemption is, for
this small particle, completed. Always, however, is exerted the
gravitational pull of matter, and the energy that drove through, instead
of pursuing a right line, tends to bend in a parabolic curve, like the
trajectory of a cannon ball. In the completion of the process some
portion of redeemed matter "gets by," so to speak, but other portions do
not; they return to their source of origin and are reabsorbed in matter,
becoming subject to the operation of future interpenetrating jets of
spiritual energy. The upward drive of the _élan vital_ constitutes what
may properly be known as evolution, the declining fall the process of
devolution or degeneration. Evolution then is only one part of the
cosmic process, it is inseparable from degeneration.

This process holds in the case of individuals, of families, of races, of
states and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is
begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to
the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined
epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no
mechanical system of "progress," no cumulative wisdom and power that in
the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For
every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within
the time allotted that will open for him the gates that bar the
frontiers of the world of reality and of redemption that lies beyond
that world of earthly life which is the field of contest between
unredeemed matter and redeeming spirit, of contest and of victory--or of
failure. In the case of races and nations and epochs there is the same
conflict between material factors and spiritual energy; the same
crescent youth with all its primal vitality, maturity with its assurance
and competence, and the dying fall of dissipating energies. In each case
death is the concomitant of life but there is always something that
lasts over, and that is the spiritual achievement, the precious residuum
that remains, defying death and dissolution, that infuses the plane of
life with its redemptive ardour, and is the heritage of lives that come
after, acting with the sacramental agencies of religion in coöperation
with God Who ordained and compassed them both, in that great process of
redemption and salvation that is continually taking place and will
continue until matter, and time which is but the ratio of the resistance
of matter to the redeeming power of spirit, shall be no more.

I confess the hopelessly mechanical quality in this vain attempt to put
into words something that by its very nature must transcend all modes of
expression that are intellectually apprehendable. Taken literally it
would be entirely false and probably heretical from a theological point
of view, as it certainly is more than inadequate as a philosophical
proposition. It is intended only as a symbol, and a gross symbol at
that, but as such I will let it stand.

Now if there is indeed a possible truth hidden somewhere within somewhat
clumsy approximations, it must modify some of our generally accepted
ideas. The life-process will appear, not a slow, interrupted, but
substantially forward development from lower and simpler organisms to
higher and more complex, with the end (if there be an end), beyond the
very limits of eternity, but rather a swift creation of some of the
highest forms through the first energy of the creative force, with the
throwing off of ever lower and lower forms as the curve of the
trajectory descends. So through a mass of low and static vitality comes
the sudden and enormous power that produces at the very beginnings of
our own recorded history of man, the almost superhuman intelligence and
capacity of the Greeks and the Egyptians. So each of the definite eras
of civilization opens with the releasing of great energies, the
revealing of great figures of paramount character and force. So,
conversely, as the energy declines, men appear less and less potent and
in a descending scale. This is the case with the Greek states, with the
Roman Republic and the Empire, with Byzantium, with

Mediaevalism, and with our modern era. I do not know of any other theory
that claims to explain the perpetual and rhythmical fluctuations of
history, as violent in their degree as they are approximately regular in
their rhythm.

Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the
lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life,
instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous
evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy,
stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to
ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed
perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction. Geology records
this process in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the
animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the
extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other
species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with
the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible
monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the
carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the
pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in
a certain degree to the dominant races of the world, whom large-hearted
optimists regard as stages of retarded development, capable, under
tutelage, of advance to a level with the Caucasian, but who, in this
view of the case, would be but the weakening product of the "dying fall"
of the energy that produced the Greek, the Semite and the Nordic stocks.

So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives
may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has
passed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of
one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from
the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last
degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these
strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its
achievement. In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly
reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as passed stages of growth,
become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved,
and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of
declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged.

Granting this theory, the search for the "missing link," whether in the
geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in
the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always
been. Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been
the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose
records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or
Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed
remnants of the same stock. Into this infinitely degraded residuum of a
vanished race entered the new energizing force when the divine creative
energy came once more into operation, in the fullness of time, and the
Minoan, the Egyptian and the Greek came almost in an hour to their
highest perfection. So through the unnumbered ages of the world's
history, God has from time to time created man in His own image, out of
the dust of the earth, and man so made "a little lower than the angels"
has, also in time, fallen and forfeited his inheritance. Yet the process
goes on without ceasing, and in conformity with some law of divine
periodicity; but it is _Man_ that is created in the beginning, of his
full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis;
not a hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural
selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through
endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last
Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare and St.
Francis.

Now in this process of the interpenetration of matter by spirit there
must be a certain periodicity, if it is a constant process and not one
accomplished once and for all time in the very beginnings of the world.
This rhythmical action, which is exemplified by every phenomenon of
nature, the vibratory process of light, sound, heat, electricity, the
pulsation of the heart, the motion of the tides, has never escaped the
observation even of primitive peoples, and always attempts have been
made to determine its periodicity. May it not be infinitely complex, as
the ripple rises on the wave that lifts on the swell of the underlying
tide? Certainly we are now being forced back to a new consideration of
this periodical beat, in history at least, for now that our own era,
which came in by the power of the Renaissance and the Reformation and
received its final energizing force through the revolutions of the
eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth, is
so manifestly coming to its end, we look backward for precedents for
this unexpected debacle and lo, they appear every five hundred years
back as far as history records. 500 B.C., Anno Domini; 500 A.D., 1000
A.D., and 1500 A.D. are all, to the point of very clear approximation,
nodal points, where the curve of the preceding five centuries, having
achieved its crest, curves downward, and in its fall meets the curve of
rising energy that is to condition the ensuing era. The next nodal
point, calculated on this basis, comes about the year 2000. Are we not
justified, in plotting our trajectory of modernism, in placing the crest
in the year 1914, and in tracing the line of fall from that moment?

I have plotted this curve, or series of curves, after a rough and ready
fashion (Diagram No. 2) and though the personal equation must, in any
subjective proposition such as this, enter largely into account, I think
the diagram will be accepted in principle if not in details, and not
wholly in its relationships. I have made no effort to estimate or
indicate comparative heights and depths, giving to each five-hundred
year epoch a similar level of rise and depth of fall. Perhaps the actual
difference here would, rightly estimated, be less than we have been led
to believe, though certainly few would lift the Carolingian crest to the
level of that of Hellenism or of the Middle Ages, nor assign to the end
of this latter period as low a fall as that accomplished during the
tenth century in continental Europe.

[Illustration: DIAGRAM No. 2. The rise and fall of the line of
civilization; showing also the nodal points at the Christian Era and at
the years 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 (?)]

In a third cut (Diagram No. 3) I have roughly indicated in conventional
form a phenomenon which seems to me to show itself around the nodal
point when a descending curve of energy meets and crosses the descending
line. As the _élan vital_ that has made and characterized any period
declines, it throws off reactions, the object of which is if possible to
arrest, or at least delay, the fatal _glissade._ These are, in intent
and in fact, reforms; conscious efforts at saving a desperate situation
by regenerative methods. Trace back their lines of procedure, and in
every case they will be found to issue out of the very force which is
even then in process of degeneration, therefore they are poisoned at the
source and no true or vital reforms, for the sudden energy that urges
them is, after all, in no respect different from that which is already a
failing force.

[Illustration: DIAGRAM No. 3. The reactions thrown off by (a) the
descending line of vital force, (b) by the ascending line.]

This, I conceive, is why today the multitudinous and specious "reforms,"
which beat upon us from all sides, and find such ready acceptance in the
enactments of law, are really no reforms at all, since each one of them
is but an exaggeration or distortion of the very principles and methods
that already are bending downward the curve of our progression until it
disappears in the nether-world of failure, as did those of every
preceding epoch of equal duration. An example of what I mean is the
astute saying, frequently heard nowadays: "The cure for democracy is
more democracy."

Now while one curve descends and throws off its reformative reactions in
the process, the other is ascending, preparatory to determining the
coming era for its allotted space of five centuries. In this process it
also throws off its own reactions, but these are for the purpose of
lifting the line more rapidly, bringing its force into play before its
determined time. These also are exaggerations, over-emphasized qualities
that are inherent in the ascending force, and they are no more to be
accepted as authoritative than are the others. They have their value
however, for they are prophetic, and even in their exaggeration there is
the clear forecast of things to be. Trace them in turn to the source.
What is their source? The new power issues out of obscurity and its
character is veiled, but we can estimate it from the very nature of the
exaggerated reactions we _can_ see. If something shows itself, in
sociology, economics, politics, religion, art, what you will, that is
especially a denial of what has been a controlling agency during the
past four or five hundred years: if it is by common consent impractical
and "outside the current of manifest evolutionary development," then,
shorn of its exaggerations, reduced to its essential quality, it is very
probably a clear showing forth of what is about to come to birth and
condition human life for the next five hundred years. This, I suppose,
explains the comprehensive return to Medievalism that, to the scorn of
biologists, sociologists and professors of political economy, is
flaunting itself before us today, at the hands of a very small minority,
in all the categories I have named, as well as in many others besides.

A glance at the diagram will show a curious pattern round about the
nodal point. One may say that the reactions are somewhat mixed. Quite
so. At this moment we are beaten upon by numberless reforms, both
"radical" and "reactionary." Materialism, democracy, rationalism,
anarchy contending against Medievalism of twenty sorts, and strange
mysticisms out of the East. Which shall we choose, _if_ we choose, and
do not content ourselves with an easier inertia that allows nature to
take its course? It is simply the question; On which wave will you ride;
that which is descending to oblivion or that which has within itself the
power and potency to control man's destiny for the next five hundred
years?




APPENDIX B


CERTAIN BOOKS SUGGESTED FOR COLLATERAL READING


ADAMS, HENRY Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres.

ADAMS, HENRY Degradation of the Democratic Dogma.

BAUDRILLART, A. Catholic Church, Renaissance and Protestantism.

BELL, BERNARD IDDINGS Right and Wrong after the War.

BELLOC, HILAIRE The Servile State.

BRYCE, VISCOUNT Modern Democracies.

BULL, PAUL B. The Sacramental Principle.

CHESTERTON, G.K. Orthodoxy.

CHESTERTON, G.K. What's Wrong with the World.

CHESTERTON, G.K. The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

CONKLIN, E.G. The Direction of Human Evolution.

CRAM, R.A. The Nemesis of Mediocrity.

CRAM, R.A. Walled Towns.

CRAM, R.A. The Ministry of Art.

CRAM, R.A. The Great Thousand Years.

FAGUET, E. The Cult of Incompetence.

FERRERO, G. Europe's Fateful Hour.

FIGGIS, J.N. Civilization at the Cross Roads.

FIGGIS, J.N. The Will to Freedom.

FIGGIS, J.N. Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God."

GENUNG, J.F. The Life Indeed.

GRAHAM, STEPHEN Priest of the Ideal.

HARRISON, McVEIGH Daily Meditations.

HUBBARD, A.J. The Fate of Empires.

IRELAND, ALLEYNE Democracy and the Human Equation.

LeBON, G. The World in Revolt.

MEIKLEJOHN, ALEXANDER The Liberal College.

MORRIS, WILLIAM The Dream of John Ball.

PECK, W.G. From Chaos to Catholicism.

PENTY, A.J. Old Worlds for New.

PENTY, A.J. The Restoration of the Guild System.

PHILLIPPS, L. MARCH Form and Colour.

PHILLIPPS, L. MARCH Europe Unbound.

PORTER, A. KINGSLEY Beyond Architecture.

POWELL, F.C. A Person's Religion.

RAUPERT, G. Human Destiny and the New Psychology.

SHIELDS, THOMAS E. The Philosophy of Education.

TAWNEY, R.H. The Acquisitive Society.

WALSH, JAMES J. The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.

WALSH, JAMES J. Education, How Old the New.

WORRINGER, W. Form Problems of the Gothic.

DeWULF, M. History of Mediaeval Philosophy.





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