The Next Step in Religion Part 9

We have seen that religion and morality marched together as long as the evolution of the society was healthy and natural. Often there was a struggle over the ritual and mythical elements in religious morality; but, as a rule, the civic type of morality gained the upper hand.

Religious sanctions were called in because of the faith in divine powers interested in the welfare of the community, but these sanctions soon ceased to be creative. While the G.o.ds remained, these sanctions would necessarily remain; yet they tended to become benevolent and secondary.

But Christianity, by reason of the forces at work at the time of its origin, nourished vicious interpretations of morality. The despair of human nature which we note in the writings of St. Paul tinged the outlook of Christian ethics. Man is by nature evil; only the working in his soul of a supernatural grace can lead him to value the things which are pure and of good {175} repute. This pessimism cannot be too sharply spurned. Man is neither angel nor devil; he is just man. And the modern thinker is pretty well convinced that morality is a purely human affair growing out of the instinctive tendencies which man has inherited in the course of evolution as these find themselves in various situations. Moral problems are meaningless apart from their setting on this earth. Man is moral because he can pa.s.s judgments upon courses of behavior and decide what best conduces to his welfare. He is moral because he can build up standards of social and personal conduct and adhere to them more or less completely. The a.s.sumption that man is immoral is psychologically untrue. The asceticism and pessimism of mediaeval Christianity was a reflection of false ideals and of an unhealthy social system. There was an element of strain in the demands held up before the individual. The spiritual life was a task which he had to accomplish because it possessed a supernatural sanction.

But the inherent pessimism of much of Christianity was not its only fault. It taught men to suppose that morality was not something which paid for itself. So much did it stress the necessity of supernatural sanctions that it led the majority to believe that no man would be good unless he had to, unless he was afraid of the external consequences which would be meted out to him at the bar of judgment. But how false such a view is. We know to-day that morality pays here and now, in the specie of a happy, healthy, well-developed life. Any other view makes morality irrational and unnatural and, consequently, dependent upon sanctions which rest upon the will of some agent apart from {176} this concrete life of act and fact. To put this criticism in the technical language of ethics, Christianity has tended to think of conduct in terms of heteronomous ethics, _i.e._, in terms of precepts and laws coming from outside of human life and pressed upon it by authority, rather than in terms of autonomous ethics for which ideals and customs are wise adjustments to the natural relations in which man finds himself.

This a.s.sumption that morality is a hardship played into the hands of a juridical notion of the sanctions of conduct, for which the conception of immortality furnished the grandiose opportunity. The arm of society is eluded at death, but death offers no escape for the wicked from the outraged deity they have offended. It is the motive of fear which is here employed. Human beings are to be scared into being good.

Morality is on the defensive because it has no real charm and natural loveliness, because it does not grow out of a rational study of human relations.

How tragically false this view was! Its existence can be explained only as an expression of an ill-organized society in which impulsive violence was not enough held in check. Supernatural sanctions could be used to restrain malefactors of great power in less happy times.

Society has grown beyond this need. Courts of law and outraged public opinion are quite able to deal with criminals. If the reason for punishment is prevention, it is certainly true that punishment by society is more likely to be effective than the postponed pains of an hereafter, because of its immediacy and power of being repeated. But it is very doubtful whether fear is a moral motive or whether it is a very effective deterrent. Social thinkers are agreed that punishment is a very {177} bungling method at the best. It does not show the presence of a very constructive imagination.

h.e.l.l has always been a magnified torture chamber. It has been the reflection on the gigantic background of the next world of the penal ideas of the time. That is why it has always been more interesting than heaven. Man feared to make a social utopia out of heaven because he conceived it as a kingdom in which he was to play a very minor role, while he was quite certain of his importance in h.e.l.l. But the morbid results of his imaginings were tragic in their effects when connected with such d.a.m.nable doctrines as infant d.a.m.nation and eternal punishment for lack of belief in a particular creed. What distorted ethical notions, what mixture of horrible fear before a world-tyrant and callous delight in the punishment of others are revealed in these pictures of a place of eternal torment! Thank goodness, the civilized world is outgrowing the whole savage set of ideas.

Before we leave these juridical religious sanctions, it may be well to call attention to the fact that theories of punishment have radically changed during the last century. The purpose of modern justice is less to uphold the majesty of an outraged law than to protect the citizens of a state and reform the character of the criminal. Crime is studied genetically and its conditions determined so far as possible. It is well known that criminals are products of biological and social conditions over which they have little control. The modern ideal is coming to be prevention by means of the betterment of social organization and negative eugenics. Healthy and capable persons in a decent society would be unlikely to turn out criminals. I do {178} not see how we can escape the conclusion that the saner penology of the present has completely undermined the whole juristic basis of the next world. Human ethics and a supernatural ethics of an eschatological sort cannot be dovetailed together. The scene and motives of a crime cannot be laid in one world with that world's peculiar conditions, and the punishment dispensed in another. And a final punishment is a veritable absurdity. Is punishment an end in itself? Are the wicked such hopeless creatures? Or does it simply mean that men have never before thought of such things as indeterminate sentences and reformation? Prisoners were hustled away and never seen afterwards.

Punishment and reward were easy matters in the old days when justice was external and terroristic; we see to-day that they are the most difficult of problems. Final judgments by omniscient judges strike us as romantic and even melodramatic. Again, we doubt such facile divisions of our mixed humanity as that between saints and sinners. We have a keener and more democratic eye for the good in the most unprepossessing of our fellow creatures. We know what he has been up against from his babyhood days, what his chances, temptations, joys and sorrows have been. And we have the deep conviction that ghostly judgment after death would be absolutely meaningless.

In an earlier chapter, we pointed out that the belief in, and desire for, immortality is stronger in periods of social disorganization than in periods of marked social unity and happy creativeness. Christianity arose in just such a time of pessimism and stifled social life. The Roman Empire had become barren of joyous hopefulness and spirited endeavor. The citizen was only a {179} unit in a dreary and monotonous whole ruled from above. All through the Middle Ages, something of this suspicion of the world, this longing for release from earthly things tinged the interests and judgments of the more spiritually-minded men and women. The inevitable ethical result was a disregard of genuine human problems and a tense exaltation of att.i.tudes of self-control and negation. Disciplines became ends in themselves, which rejected all relation to the life of every day. The direction of ethical life was away from creative activity and concern with the more homely things, and toward an abstract contemplation of ideals seldom put to the test of positive application. The religious setting of life withdrew human energies from their rightful and fruitful sphere of activity and applied them to tasks of self-a.n.a.lysis and never-ceasing self-criticism. Such an approach to life produced men who were saints, men who were unselfish and admirable in almost every way; but this saintliness grew at the expense of significant human achievement. It was as though men forged splendid instruments and did not know how to use them. The pity of it all is, that this mediaeval world-view stimulated men to devotions of soul which looked away from the arena of human life rather than into it.

But religion only revealed what human nature, itself, possessed. These capacities for sympathy, love, persistent self-discipline, and devotion to ideals were natural to man. The primary fault with Mediaevalism was the inability to see the worth of human things and the hypnotic fixation of the mind upon unreal relations and demands. The modern man admires these cloistered saints and, at the same time, feels the tragedy and {180} futility of this goodness which wearied itself out in vigil and prayer. The human cost of this virtue was so high and its objective use so small. It is only as an artist that I can enjoy reading the _Prayers and Meditations_ of Thomas a Kempis. When this mood is not upon me, I am repelled by the picture of this white-faced monk in his cell, holding in restraint all his natural impulses by means of the thought of a reward in paradise after death. Virtue was the winning of a goal set by his Maker, for reasons which he did not dream of questioning. "When I weary of the long night vigils, or of the Lessons, longer perhaps than usual, give me grace to remember how great are the rewards in heaven which I have now a chance of gaining.

When the days of abstinence from food and drink are many, give me the power to fast, and good health to enable me to carry on my work; give me pardon for the sins which I have committed, keep me from falling into them again, relieve me from the punishment they have deserved, and give me a good hope of everlasting happiness with the elect in the Kingdom of G.o.d." We feel that this ethical energy should have been used otherwise and in the service of human beings. Better Thomas a Kempis than the man who is mad for wealth and the l.u.s.ts of the flesh; but far better than either is the sane worker for things of good repute. His goodness is a social goodness which makes life happier and fuller of activities and things worth while.

The traditional religion has not only been, frequently enough, anti-social, but it has also been morally inefficient. Why? Because it has made too much of tension and too little of intelligence.

Instead of pointing out that morality paid because it was only the application {181} of intelligence to human needs, it set a standard of moral discipline before people and then sought to drive them to its attainment by sheer force of will and subjectively aroused emotion.

The modern ethical thinker is convinced that morality is but the harmonious adjustment of an individual to his social group; it is the sensible foresight which selects the active values which attract and express man's nature.

This rather blind tension of traditional religion appears quite clearly in the conception of sin. The setting of this idea has been monarchic and terroristic. It has exhaled an atmosphere of sharp, mystic contrasts which were as unreal as they were vicious. To set a goal too high is almost as bad psychologically as to set it too low.

Christianity vaguely felt this flaw in its dramatic ethical scheme and was led to bring the doctrine of G.o.d's saving grace to the front to bridge the fearful gulf caused by the opposition of G.o.d's perfection to man's imperfection. But the man of to-day who is sincere with himself knows that this religious world-ethics is a meaningless fiction. He can understand why it arose in the olden days, with its supernaturalism and juridical ethics, yet he feels that this absolutism is a product of monarchism and pre-evolutionary thinking. Goodness is a human ideal whose content is always undergoing change, while it hovers just beyond man's reach. I must confess, then, that I have little sympathy with the gross exaggerations a.s.sociated with this word sin. I know that I often fall short of my better moral judgment and, at such moments of moral insight, I experience a keen regret and try to strengthen those tendencies and activities which will aid me to do better next time.

But I know too {182} much of personality on its biological, psychological and social sides, too much of its complexity and its foundations to retain the old notion of the self as an ent.i.ty which, having the ability to be G.o.dlike, chooses evil. Paul's G.o.d was an oriental monarch; to the modern, he is a cad. Why, no sensible teacher asks the impossible of his pupils! Yet this strange relation conceived to exist between an omnipotent deity and his frail creatures, when intensified by the horizon of another and eternal world, was bound to develop the tensest and most paralyzing of att.i.tudes. No novel has been able to unfold a plot which has such psychological possibilities.

And the morbid and exalted religious imagination has done more than justice to them. While I do not for a moment deny the strength and leverage this ensemble of ideas possesses when faith is present, I do contend that the whole creation is unhealthy and blinding and involves inefficiency as regards the real and pressing problems of personal and social development. The ecclesiastic seldom has a normal perspective.

Take Cardinal Newman, for instance. Can one deny that this subtle personality, for all his gifts, brought distorting values into the current of life? Such a man is certain to misread movements and activities and to magnify the subjective at the expense of the social.

The individual who identifies himself with social projects, able to elicit his energy and enthusiasm, is more apt to forget the pettier interests of the moment in the broad sweep of creative endeavor than is the person who morbidly catechizes his conscience. A formal morality which looks inward and never outward is bound to be inefficient.

Tension is no fit subst.i.tute for intelligent insight.

{183}

Many theologians a.s.sume that ethics has a choice only between reliance upon some supernatural power for its sanctions, and a sort of harsh and haughty stoicism, in which the individual stands alone and by sheer force of will establishes and maintains ideals which are alien to his nature. The fallacy in such an a.s.sumption is not hard to detect. By his training in the ascetic traditions of Christianity with its acquiescence in the doctrine of original sin, the theologian is initiated into a distorted conception of human nature and of human relations. While man is a complex being with many instincts and possibilities to adjust and organize in an efficient and progressive way, it is slanderous to a.s.sert that these instincts are evil or that man, on the whole, does not relate them quite satisfactorily to a plan of life. Human nature is a sweeter, saner thing than the ascetic admits; man is capable of heroic idealisms and of far-reaching sympathies which express themselves in the mold of society. As a matter of fact, the haughty stoicism of which the religious writer speaks with so much pity, as the only alternative to supernatural relations and sanctions, is a product of times of social disruption when the high-strung individual is thrown back upon himself. To-day, people live and think in groups, with common hopes, standards and plans. Their conscience is a social conscience which finds its supporting echo in the deeds and sentiments of their companions and fellow workers. It is the supernaturalist who is an egoist at heart.

Even Mr. Wells is so dominated by this anti-social point of view that he falsifies both psychology and fact in his tirade upon the sane worker for human values. No one who knew the elements of modern ethical thought {184} based, as it is, upon an evolutionary social psychology would subscribe to the following nonsense: "The benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him.... He has no one to whom he can give himself. He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no one watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can but e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. He has no real and living link with other men of good will." Of course, one can write such things if one wishes to. But the social reformer knows that his problems are human problems whose solution rests upon sentiments of sympathy, enlightened and directed by intelligence. They who seek for the advent of a better day for humanity band together as naturally and loyally as ever did the believers in the second coming of Christ.

The remark is frequently made that the modern world is tending to return to the Greek view of life. If by the Greek view of life is meant the outlook characteristic of the Greeks of the cla.s.sic period--the era of Plato, Pericles, and Sophocles,--there is much truth in the judgment. Human values are again coming uppermost in men's minds. This life is not a sojourn in a vale of tears, but the scene of the attempts of socially-minded, conscious organisms to achieve a temperate and fairly happy existence. But the centuries intervening have not been without their effect; man's moral horizon has been both deepened and enlarged. Since those halcyon days, man has eaten of the tree of good and {185} evil, he has fought with shadowy monsters and wandered for years in the wilderness of helplessness and pessimism, he has worshiped at the shrine of strange G.o.ds and prostrated himself before the terrors of his own imagination. Slowly he has come to stand erect and look about him and see the world and himself as they actually are. Knowledge has become his most trusted instrument, and democratic sympathy with human life his most cherished guide. With such a guide and with such an instrument, he will before long set about to mold his life in accordance with those mellower ideals which have grown in his heart during his long pilgrimage. At last, man is becoming an adult able to stand upon his feet and to look keenly around with a measuring glance at things as they are. Will he not work for the sweet fruition of those human values which are dear to his very soul--home, children, kindly social intercourse, work which gives self-expression, art, knowledge, contentment, all suffused with the vigor of healthy bodies and the sleep of quiet nights? Man will surely come to desire greatly, and achieve magnificently, and live courageously.

Now that the ethical degradation of the industrial revolution has been stayed and society has turned its face from the clatter of ma.s.s-production for its own sake, now that ethical reflection has been united with reason and science in a sane realism, now that sympathy is abroad in the land, now that democracy with its conception of human brotherhood is astir throughout the world, ethics has secured a firm foundation in the free aspirations of free men. If n.o.ble character and rational conduct cannot maintain themselves in such a society, then the theologian can rightly say that man is {186} by nature corrupt. But the present is a time of growing loyalties to the common good and of vigorous search for the efficient means to attain it in greater measure. The great spiritual adventures of the future will surely be human and humane.

{187}

CHAPTER XIV

THE CHURCH AS AN INSt.i.tUTION--THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Even a cursory glance at the inst.i.tutional history of Christianity is instructive. Beginning as an essentially democratic brotherhood of fellow-believers in which wisdom and experience, rather than authority, guided affairs, the Christian community gradually adopted the political form of the society in which it found itself. The very names of the church officials of whom we read in the later canonical epistles are taken over from the munic.i.p.al governments of the time. The presbyters, or elders, were old men selected by common consent from the members of the congregation as a sort of advisory council. They were committee-men, ripe in experience and capable of dealing sensibly with the various problems sure to arise from time to time in the social group. From among these elders, overseers, or bishops, were chosen who had administrative functions of an indefinite sort. Besides these officials, there were deacons, prophets and teachers, men who took a more or less conspicuous part in the life of the brotherhood.

As time elapsed, the Christian communities took on a more formal organization, an evolution which was due to the stress of problems which could not be met without a more centralized structure. New heresies were {188} constantly arising and leading the members into confusion; moral disorders, like those against which Paul had to thunder, were continually appearing. It was only too easy for members of unorganized groups to miss that sense of a common outlook which is so important and yet so difficult to maintain in an age of intellectual and moral turmoil. This situation was grasped by leaders who had decided views of their own as to the proper doctrines to be taught and the proper mode of life to follow. Under their guidance, a centralization of authority was evolved. The bishop became the head of the community with power in matters of doctrine and morality.

Naturally, the heads of the more important communities, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople, had a prestige which gave their opinions differential weight. Before long, councils of bishops were called to decide questions of doctrine. The period of fixed creeds had arrived.

Once this direction was taken, it was no long step to the formation of a church organization comparable in complexity to that of the Roman Empire and as undemocratic in character. Such a development was most natural; and it would, indeed, have been surprising had it not occurred. Inst.i.tutions always possess the imprint of their age. It is foolish, because unhistorical, to expect ideals out of their time.

The primitive Christian a.s.sociation was more than a church in the modern sense. It was a loyal group of like-minded people. It was a state within the state, a social unit dominating the main part of the lives of its members, and not merely a center for worship. It is this aspect of the early religious a.s.sociations which I wish to stress; for it is the question, whether this phase {189} of the church still exists to justify the church as an inst.i.tution, into which I wish to enquire.

In the vast loneliness of the Roman Empire, men felt the need to draw together in order to escape the dreariness of life. The teeming interests and intense loyalties of the old city-state had disappeared and left men stranded in a cosmopolitan State, ordered from above, in which they had no vital partic.i.p.ation; it was too gigantic and formal to touch them in a personal fashion and to kindle those enthusiasms which lift men beyond economic cares. It was well to be a Roman citizen, but such an honor did not suffice for the more homely needs of everyday existence. In the days of Athenian greatness, the individual was lost in the citizen; in the Roman Empire, the citizen was lost in the individual. Man is a social animal--to adapt Aristotle's famous expression--and the inhabitants of the various countries sought to create a.s.sociations of various sorts to fill this gap caused by the destruction of the old political interests. In other words, men tried to weave a new social tissue of a private type to answer their craving for companionship and for the chance to do something worth doing.

Remove the business, artistic, political, trades-union, literary and social interests in their present free and varied form from modern life, and we can gain some idea of the unsatisfactoriness of human life under the Empire for the lower and poorer cla.s.ses. Monotonous as village life is to-day, it is throbbing with life as compared with the village or tenement district of ancient days. The farmer has his newspaper, the farmer's wife the magazine, and the piano, and the trip to town. Small wonder that these men and women of the h.e.l.lenistic and Roman worlds {190} formed clubs and a.s.sociations in which to escape from a disheartening loneliness and feel themselves members one of another.

But the Empire essayed to stamp out these brotherhoods, in order that it might be all in all and receive the loyalty and affection which these private organizations evoked. The ancient state was unable to conceive that division of interests into public and private which is so marked a feature of modern civilization. As Renan points out, the Empire "was trying, out of homage to an exaggerated idea of the State, to isolate the individual, to snap every moral tie between man and man, to defeat a legitimate desire of the poor, the desire to press together in a little corner of their own to keep one another warm. The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life seemed worse than death." a.s.sociations, or clubs, in which a complete equality reigned sprang up on every side in spite of the laws against combination.

Human relations of the most kindly and intimate sort were established which sweetened life and made death less lonely. Now the Christian communities were just such a.s.sociations; while they added religious emotions and hopes to the attractions of companionship. They were social units of a humble and spontaneous type within the formal structure of the Empire. They justified themselves in a human as well as in a superhuman way. An adequate psychology of religion remains to be written. Religion has always had its markedly social side.

Upon the foundation of this combined social and religious function, the superstructure of the Church was erected, much as on the political nature of man the Greek city-state arose. Creed and hierarchy were {191} inevitable products whose appearance could have been predicted, but they were expressive of a certain growing c.u.mbersomeness and a slowing up of the thought and action of the ma.s.s of the people.

Henceforth, one of their religious duties was to believe fanatically what bishops and councils promulgated and to obey the advice of their superiors in matters of conduct. In this way, Christianity became a religion of authority. We must not over-idealize the early Christians--a reading of Paul's epistles would help to guard us against that tendency--but the spirit of the primitive congregations was, beyond much doubt, n.o.bler than that which characterized the mobs of Alexandria and of Byzantium. A perusal of _Hypatia_, for example, is very apt to sober one's enthusiasm. We must remember that the bars of admission were lowered as Christianity became powerful and popular.

Selection, which is one of the most attractive features of a new movement, no longer acted. It was at this period that Christianity developed its _cult_ aspect. It became a religion of the imagination, of the sensuous, as well as of the will and the intellect. Ancient art and liturgy gave their contributions and Christianity moved from the catacombs to the basilica and the cathedral.

As Church and state became reconciled, the early breach between public and private life was filled. The religious interest and its duties joined themselves to those of secular life. For the ma.s.s of the people who did not surrender themselves to religion in the intensive way reserved for the clergy, Christianity simply forced a new alignment of social relations and values. The ideal was a Church-directed civilization in which the next world overshadowed this. For ordinary life, {192} however, a practical adjustment was soon reached. Life was lived in a conventional enough way and the compromise was balanced by the efficacy of sacraments administered by the servants of the authoritative Church, the continuation of the incarnation upon the earth.

In the chaotic West, overrun by barbarians, society lost its ancient form and became stratified in accordance with a decentralized, military regime. The strongly organized, international Church maintained itself and saw an opportunity to realize its ideal, a civilization, or order, guided by itself and obedient to religious values. Should not the vice-regent of G.o.d rule upon the earth and make the divine law the law of the nations? In the conflict between the Roman Church, as reorganized by Hildebrand, and the Holy Roman Empire, we have a striking instance of that recurrent struggle between the supernatural and the secular so peculiar to the Christian world. Had not the emperors possessed some religious sanction for their claims and authority, they would have been completely overridden by the popes. It was the growth from beneath of national and human interests and of a more varied and stimulating social life that ultimately defeated the political aims of the Church. Humanism always flourishes when peace and contentment are abroad, and humanism is the deadliest enemy that supernaturalism has to meet. Thus the tradition of the Roman Empire tided secular authority over until the rise of vigorous nations with distinct customs, languages, and loyalties ceased to make the imperial and theocratic aspirations of the Church practical. But we must never forget that these aspirations of the Mediaeval Church were natural outgrowths of the {193} religious view of the world. If man is but a sojourner here, undergoing his tests for the life to come, who can be a better guide in all things than the divine inst.i.tution established by G.o.d himself? The center of gravity of man's life falls outside this world.

But social tendencies and relations are always more complex and uncontrollable than theory or doctrine wishes to allow. Human values have a way of a.s.serting themselves in all sorts of unexpected ways.

The very act of living forces man to feel and achieve, to strive for this thing and for that, to enter into warm human relations which lead out into ambitions and desires. So, in spite of the official, and generally accepted, denial of human values, these sprang up at the least encouragement and flowered in custom and art. Thus, even during the Middle Ages, social activities had their innings and fair measure of attention. Men loved, and sinned, and fought, and dreamed much as they did in other days and do now. The thought of another world only tempered their moments of reflection and deepened their periods of contrition. There is good reason to believe, moreover, that men alternated between extremes of mood more than we do to-day with our settled horizon. The mediaeval outlook did not favor that quiet temperance which the Greeks achieved in their happiest days.

With the rise of the cities and the national states came the revival of learning and a fresh interest in all phases of human life. The complete control of human life by a supernaturalistic religion was then no longer even a theoretical possibility. Life became a thing of interest for its own sake, something frankly to be enjoyed. Humanism had once more appeared in the world.

{194}

But the Church had an organized breadth which went far beyond the purely religious functions which Protestantism is inclined to a.s.sociate with the inst.i.tution. Within this socially flexible organization arose the monastic orders whose ideals varied from age to age. To establish industries, to clear the land, to preach the n.o.bility of work and to foster commerce, to nurse the sick, to found schools and universities, to distribute charity, to offer hospitality to wayfarers, to nourish art and literature, all these activities grew out of the initiative of n.o.ble men who found the atmosphere or a.s.sociations of organized Christianity favorable to their endeavors. It was under the shelter of religion that the finer phases of morality manifested themselves.

Secular life did not possess a stability or organs adequate to the tasks of social ethics. Whatever new movement appeared naturally drifted into contact with the Church, even though the Church was not certain what to do with it. Sometimes these vital movements, in which ethical idealism of a rare type was displayed, almost threatened the existence of the hierarchical body which was in control of the organization through which they had to work. This was the situation which developed as a result of the spread of the ideals of the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century. Such an occurrence makes us realize that the social life of the time was creative, and that this creativeness could with difficulty be kept within the control of the formal Church; yet the organs which were necessary for the application of these ideas and enthusiasms were molded in accordance with ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions, because no other model was at hand.

Secular life was too narrow to give either financial support or suggestions. It {195} had so long been accustomed to a.s.sign the moral field to religious inst.i.tutions.

In spite of the undercurrent of criticism against the worldliness of the clergy which discovers itself to the historian of the later Middle Ages, the social movements connected with incorporated Christianity were vital enough to justify the existence of the Church. It acted as the traditional center of philanthropy, and its immense wealth made this feature a real force among the poor. But the other a.s.sociated functions were slowly separating themselves from their original connection and striking roots in the secular life of the time. In place of the cathedral towns cl.u.s.tered around the cathedral and the bishop's palace, the commercial towns pushed to the front both in wealth and importance. The wealthy merchant or banker vied in riches with the churchman. Art and literature pa.s.sed from the hands of the Church to the laity. This process was very gradual, but steady and persistent. By the time of the reformation, it was in full swing.

Beneath the framework of feudalism and the Mediaeval Church, a new society had been forming, far more complex than the old and full of potentialities which we are only now beginning to measure. Industry, commerce, geographical discovery, national literature, guilds, munic.i.p.al governments, courts, science, secular art, philosophy, all were present either in bud or in full flower. Out of the fertile and fearless life which came from the interplay of these tendencies and activities, new ideas and values were born and soon found or created appropriate organs for their expression apart from the Church. Try as it would, Mother Church could not cover them with her wings. Many of these activities were alien to {196} her genius and, as they waxed in strength and confidence, stepped boldly out into the arena of secular life.

One has only to take a broad survey of modern society to realize how completely secular life has found means to perform functions which were formerly carried by the Church. The very control which the Church wished to exercise repelled them and drove them into the world with its freedom and tolerance. Free a.s.sociation, individual enterprise, the creative fervor of genius, and, later, governmental policy have worked wonders in overcoming the meagerness of secular life. Education is now almost universal, and so the ma.s.ses live lives which touch a myriad interests never known to them in other days. Art has broadened its scope and now touches with magic fingers all phases of human life, nature and man being alike raised to a higher spiritual level by her work. Science has reached out into all parts of nature and thrown a transforming light upon all things. Philosophy has left the old scholastic concepts and mated with science to explain the world in which we live. Charity is giving way to a broader conception of social justice. In short, the old division of life into two spheres, the earthly and the spiritual, no longer has its old significance. The spiritual has made its home in man's daily life, in his reading, his art, his thinking and his doing. _Wherever there are genuine values, there is the spiritual_. _Is not loyalty to these spiritual values of human life coming to be the sole meaning of religion_? Is it within the power of an inst.i.tution, still dominated by beliefs hostile to this frank humanism, to cherish and guide the unfolding of the spiritual life of the present? That is the query which I bring with me when I contemplate the {197} Church. Has not the free life of the present outgrown any centralized and inst.i.tutionalized control?

To-day, ideas and enthusiasms find their organs in the teeming secular world. Moral idealism is at home upon the earth in fellowships and loyalties in which men discover much of their reason for being. The pulse of society beats time to the songs of its true poets, and throbs at the call to battle for some n.o.ble achievement, while the Church dreams of the past and the days of her greatness, or tenderly stoops to comfort those who cling to her sanctions and her vision of a heavenly kingdom, not of this world. She played her part, and she played it greatly--that much we must avow, even while we point out her present limitations--but the world has pa.s.sed beyond her tutelage and runs lithesomely and courageously into fields where she cannot bring herself to follow. Thus is it, and thus has it always been--inst.i.tutions and ideas have their period of usefulness when they serve as organizing centers for social tendencies; but the time inevitably comes when they lose their creative power and are outgrown by the life which has made them and is greater than they. And yet there is hope. Will the dethroned monarch recognize the inevitableness of the ma.s.sive revolution which is surging round her and give up her outgrown pretensions, willingly consenting to play a lesser role in full harmony with the spirit of the time? Not yet will this voluntary abdication come. But, some time in the future, the new loyalties will surely seep into the Church and prepare it for the great sacrifice in which it will find its saving service. Modernism can afford to wait patiently, for time fights on its side.

{198}

CHAPTER XV