The Profits of Religion Part 22

And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches, like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of this--any more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary thought can see the main outlines of the future. We see that in these new church activities the clergy are inspired by things read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers. They are responding to the actual, instant needs of their boys in the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have an effect upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates, will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the clergyman who helps in Y.M.C.A. work in France, or in Red Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and social solidarity by the method which modern educators most favor--by doing. Also he will have absorbed a ma.s.s of ideas in news despatches from over the world. He is forced to read these despatches carefully, because the fate of his own boys is involved; and we Socialists will see to it that the despatches are well filled with propaganda!

The Desire of Nations

So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and say that we think about nothing but the belly--and that is true, in a way; because we are the representatives of a starving cla.s.s, which thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is ravening with hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the body," and then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls; whereas at present we are led to despise the very word "spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and poseurs.

We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to us. We would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if there were in the world inst.i.tutions conducted by men and women of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not upon superst.i.tion. The men who teach it must be men who know what truth is, and the pa.s.sionate loyalty which the search for truth inspires. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers we see in the churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather than trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift to train them ourselves--we amateurs, not knowing much about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against organized wrong.

It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it is a fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need it just as badly as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race. That we need it is proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our midst--the schisms which waste the greater part of our activities, and which are often the result of personal jealousies and petty vanities. To lift men above such weakness, to make them really brothers in a great cause--that is the work of "personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the words.

We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the dream of it is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and conviction. Read these lines from "The Desire of Nations," by Edwin Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer who is at hand:

And when he comes into the world gone wrong, He will rebuild her beauty with a song.

To every heart he will its own dream be: One moon has many phantoms in the sea.

Out of the North the norns will cry to men: "Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"

The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead: "Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"

The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice: "Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"

And social architects who build the State, Serving the Dream at citadel and gate, Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.

And glad quick cries will go from man to man: "Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan, The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"

The Knowable

The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the microscope and the telescope, of the new psychology and the new sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient Mythologies. And even if this were not so, the business of the thinker is to follow the facts. The history of all philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out his hands and cries for it; but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his mother's breast and takes a drink of milk.

Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him to be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the knowledge immediately and finally, and invents innumerable systems and creeds.

He makes himself believe them, with fire and torture makes other men believe them; until finally, in the confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the discovery that his tools are inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative, while the First Cause is absolute.

This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four propositions: first, that the universe is limitless in time and s.p.a.ce; second, that matter is composed of simple, indivisible elements; third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, that there must be an absolute or first cause. And having proven these things, he turned round and proved their opposites, with arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows these demonstrations and understands them, takes all his metaphysical learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.

It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition, you take another flight, and come back the way you were before. So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose of Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves hysterical women like "Mother" Eddy; it serves the New-thoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to befuddle the wits of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that it is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist who lays down a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a Christian.

How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the "Positivists", and attended their imitation church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction from them. In the midst of their dogmatic p.r.o.nouncements I found myself remembering how the egg falls apart and reveals a chicken, how the worm suddenly discovers itself a b.u.t.terfly.

The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile occupation to set limits upon the future. Our business is not to say what men will know ten thousand years from now, but to content ourselves with the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.

In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is order in creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which can be applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for its mother's breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts it when he declares that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets it down for a certainty that this will always be so--that he is not being played with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H20 to behave like water, and tomorrow like benzine.

Nature's Insurgent Son

Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each bit of knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life becomes a new thing. Consider, for example, what a different place the world became to the man who discovered that the force which laid the forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warm a cave and make wild grains nutritious! In other words, man can create life, he can make the world and himself into that which his reason decides it ought to be, The means by which he does this is the most magical of all the tools he has invented since his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of experimental science--and when one considers that this weapon has been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning of human evolution.

To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered product--that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this forth with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man". We are, at this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous transition stage, as a child playing with explosives. This child has found out how to alter his environment in many startling ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, nor to what purpose. He finds that certain things are uncomfortable, and these he proceeds immediately to change.

Discovering that grain fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of drunkards; discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession of empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption, and fall into ruins again.

This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a million million men to produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy.

Nature's present impulse appears as a rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will emanc.i.p.ate himself from her law, will save himself from her blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with gla.s.ses, and the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.

What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing our sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful, because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breeding which will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at life. We can replace instinct by self-discipline. We can subst.i.tute for the regime of "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what he wishes to be and how to set about to be it.

Whether this can happen, whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into the melting pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely such a contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to perform the act of self-emanc.i.p.ation, to take up the marvellous new tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life of the race.

The New Morality

Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers; driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call the elan vital. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of distress. So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the final goal is a condition of free and constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is enduring.

That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It is a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall upon the earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other hand, it is a conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements of comets, and even of starry systems. It seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate environment---

The untamed giants of nature shall bow down--- The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease From mockery and destruction, and be turned Unto the making of the soul of man.

It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food from the elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it is conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present prey upon his body, and so put an end to death. It is certain that he will ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human qualities as he has created the spurs of the fighting-c.o.c.k and the legs of the greyhound.

He will find out what genius is, and the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be recognized. In the new science of psycho-a.n.a.lysis he has already begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into the light of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy which the psychic researchers are acc.u.mulating, he is beginning to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which may come to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars, and of the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are disclosing.

All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way of their realization? Ignorance and superst.i.tion, fear and submission, the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him from his animal past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden of the soul is the task of the modern thinker.

The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save the law of his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself imposes.

The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true pleasure is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.

The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there is no authority above reason; no possibility of such authority, because if such were to appear, reason would have to judge it, and accept or reject it.

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy tomorrow.

This new morality, like all things in a world of strife, is fighting for existence, using its own weapons, which are reason and love.

Obviously it can use no others, without self-destruction; yet it has to meet enemies who fight with the old weapons of force and fraud.

Whether it will prevail is more than any prophet can say. Perhaps it is too much to ask that it should succeed--this insolent effort of the pigmy man to leap upon the back of his master and fit a bridle into his mouth. Perhaps it is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, the scientists and poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race.

Perhaps the nerve of the pigmy will fail him at the critical moment, and he will fall from the back of his master, and under his master's hoofs.

The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and as scientists we can proclaim it--the human race is in a swift current of degeneration, which a new morality alone can check. The struggle is at its height in our time; if it fails, if the fibre of the race continues to deteriorate, the soul of the race to be eaten out by poverty and luxury, by insanity and disease, by prost.i.tution, crime and war--then mankind will slip back into the abyss, the untamed giants of Nature will resume their ancient sway, and the tides, the tempest and the lightning will sweep the earth clean again. I do not believe that this calamity will befall us. I know that in the diseased social body the forces of resistance are gathering--the Socialist movement, in the broad sense--the activities of all who believe in the possibility of reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice and love. To such people this book goes out: to the truly religious people, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness here and now, who believe in brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear pain and ridicule and privation for the sake of its ultimate achievement.

From discord and defeat, From doubt and lame division, We pluck the fruit and eat; And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....

O sorrowing hearts of slaves, We heard you beat from far!

We bring the light that saves, We bring the morning star; Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things are....

Envoi

I have come to the end of my task; but one question troubles me. I think of the "young men and maidens meek" who will read this book, and I wonder what they will make of it. We have had a lark together; we have gone romping down the vista of the ages, swatting every venerable head that showed itself, beating the dust out of ancient delusions.

You would like all your life to be that kind of lark; but you may not find it so, and perhaps you will suffer disillusionment and vexation.

I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have nearly all been gallant and honest, but they have not all been wise, and therefore not so happy as they might have been. In the course of time I have formulated to myself the peril to which young radicals are exposed. We see so much that is wrong in ancient things, it gets to be a habit with us to reject them. We have only to know that a thing is old to feel an impulse of impatient scorn; on the other hand, we are tempted to welcome anything which can prove itself to be unprecedented. There is a common type of radical whose aim in life is to be several jumps ahead of mankind; whose criterion of conduct is that it shocks the bourgeois. If you do not know that type, you may find him--and her--in the newest of the Bohemian cafes, drinking the newest red chemicals, smoking the newest brand of cigarettes, and discussing the newest form of psycopathia s.e.xualis. After you have watched them a while, you realize that these ultra-new people have fallen victim to the oldest form of logical fallacy, the non sequitur, and likewise to the oldest form of slavery, which is self-indulgence.

If it is true that much in the old moral codes is based upon ignorance, and cultivated by greed, it is also true that much in the old moral codes is based upon facts which will not change so long as man is what he is--a creature of impulses, good and bad, wise and foolish, selfish and generous, and compelled to make choice between these impulses; so long as he is a material body and a personal consciousness, obliged to live in society and adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would like to say to young radicals--if there is any way to say it without seeming a prig--is that in choosing their own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and judgment and hard study.

It is our fundamental demand that society shall cease to repeat over and over the blunders of the past, the blunders of tyranny and slavery, of luxury and poverty, which wrecked the ancient societies; and surely it is a poor way to begin by repeating in our own persons the most ancient blunders of the moral life. To light the fires of l.u.s.t in our hearts, and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are trying new experiments in psychology! Who does not know the radical woman who demonstrates her emanc.i.p.ation from convention by destroying her nerves with nicotine? Who does not know the genius of revolt who demonstrates his repudiation of private property by permitting his lady loves to support him? Who does not know the man who finds in the phrases of revolution the most effective devices for the seducing of young girls?

You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the conclusion that there is anything in it to spare you the duty of getting yourself moral standards and holding yourself to them. On the contrary, because your task is the highest and hardest that man has yet undertaken--for this reason you will need standards the most exacting ever formulated.

Let me quote some words from a teacher you will not accuse of holding to the slave-moralities:

Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I hear, and not that thou hast escaped a yoke.

Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke? Free from what?

What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell me: free to what?