The Profits of Religion Part 5

The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through them, of which this is one. Where G.o.d has been so patient, it is not for us to be impatient.

And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing us back to the faith of our fathers:

The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social arrangements, but to personal vices.

I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just what, if anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our time. I find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of Durham, as being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop Westcott, whether he is talking to a high society congregation, or to one of workingmen, shows "an exquisite sense of knowing always where to stop." So I consulted the Bishop's volume, "The Social Aspects of Christianity" and I see at once why he is popular with the anti-Socialist propagandists--neither I or any other man can possibly discover what he really means, or what he really wants done.

I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I kept on the good Bishop's trail, I might in the end find something a plain man could understand; so I got the beautiful two-volume "Life of Brooke Westcott, by his Son"--and there I found an exposition of the social purposes of bishops! In the year 1892 there was a strike in Durham, which is in the coal country; the employers tried to make a cut in wages, and some ten thousand men walked out, and there was a long and bitter struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at last the masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as arbitrator, and the dispute was triumphantly settled--how do you suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!

I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the NAIVETe with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the story of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came out from the conference "all smiles, and well satisfied with the result of his day's work." As for his followers, they were in ecstacies; they "seized and waltzed one another around on the carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flower show ball. Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer ourselves hoa.r.s.e." The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more communication on episcopal stationery--an order to all his clergy to "offer their humble and hearty thanks to G.o.d for our happy deliverance from the strife by which the diocese has been long afflicted." Strange to say, there were a few varlets in Durham who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop, and one of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he made reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life. The biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he had been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not permitted to; while the working people, who didn't want to live on tea and toast, were compelled to!

Dead Cats

For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been fighting with every resource at their command the liberal and enlightened men of England who wished to educate the ma.s.ses of the people. In 1807 the first measure for a national school-system was denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as "derogatory to the authority of the Church." As a counter-measure, his supporters established the "National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the Established Church"; and the founder of the organization, a clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and insisted that the children of the workers "should not be taught beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops, setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" that "the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and precepts of revealed religion." In 1850 a bill for secular education was denounced as presenting to the country "a choice between Heaven or h.e.l.l, G.o.d or the Devil." In 1870, Forster, author of the still unpa.s.sed bill, wrote that while the parsons were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into savages."

As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred emanc.i.p.ation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of London laid down the formula of exploitation: "Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do not make the least alteration of civil property."

Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the cultured cla.s.ses of England:

In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable inst.i.tution of slavery, or what subject they touched, these leisured cla.s.ses, these educated cla.s.ses, these t.i.tled cla.s.ses have been in the wrong.

The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious cla.s.ses ", for he belonged to the religious cla.s.ses himself; but a study of the record will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform measures which Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It opposed all the social reforms of Lord Salisbury. This n.o.ble-hearted Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to the end only a few. He expressed himself as distressed and puzzled "to find support from infidels and non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers."

And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of Bishops voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; The House of Bishops opposed Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerning this establishment Lord Salisbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase: "This vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life."

He told the Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform, because he knew that they would never begin.

Another member of the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russel, has written of their record and adventures:

They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the b.l.o.o.d.y penal code; they were the resolute opponents of every political or social reform; and they had their reward from the nation outside parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep an engagement to preach lest the congregation should stone him. The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his life after preaching at St. Bride's, Fleet Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for his primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the mob. On the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester were burnt in effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop Howley's chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown at him, when the Archbishop--a man of apostolic meekness--replied: "You should be thankful that it was not a live one."

The people had reason for this conduct--as you will always find they have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote another member of the English ruling cla.s.ses, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives "an instance, of the procedure of Church and State about this period":

In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their cla.s.s, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at first promised his help, now turned against them, and the masters promptly reduced the wage to 7s., with a threat of further reduction. Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for which all seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to the a.s.sizes.

The prison chaplain tried to bully them into submission. The judge determined to convict them, and directed that they should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III, specially pa.s.sed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore.

The grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing type. The judge summed up as follows: "Not for anything that you have done, or that I can prove that you intend to do, but for an example to others I consider it my duty to pa.s.s the sentence of seven years' penal transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and every one of you."

Suffer Little Children

The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by them, He did not consider them superfluous. "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven", He said; and His Church is the inheritor of this tradition--"feed my lambs". There were children in Great Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin's "Industrial History of England":

Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave oweners in the American markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of their oweners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill owener with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night.

In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of children nine years of age to fourteen hours a day. This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, worshipper of the G.o.ds" ... so begins the oldest legal code which has come down to us, from 2250 B.C.; and the coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the same thesis.

The duty of submission, not merely to divinely chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people pet.i.tion for "increase of grace to hear meekly Thy Word"; and here is this "Word," as little children are made to learn it by heart. If there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics, I do not know where to find it.

My duty towards my neighbour is ... To honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority under him; To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters: To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters.... Not to covet nor desire other men's goods; But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please G.o.d to call me.

A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers was Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the t.i.tle of a book in which they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly known as "Little h.e.l.l." In this place two hundred people were crowded into nineteen houses. "There is not one creature in it that can give a cup of broth if it would save a life." In one winter eighteen perished of "a putrid fever", and the clergyman "could not raise a six-pence to save a life."

And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be sentenced to death for stealing b.u.t.ter from a dealer who had asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because G.o.d had sent them her pious self. "In suffering by the scarcity, you have but shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place she explained that the famine was caused by G.o.d to teach the poor to be grateful to the rich!

Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite all ranks of people together, to show the poor how immediately they are dependent upon the rich, and to show both rich and poor that they are all dependent upon Himself.

It has also enabled you to see more clearly the advantages you derive from the government and const.i.tution of this country--to observe the benefits flowing from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the high to so liberally a.s.sist the low.

It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by this pious reasoning; for they a.s.sembled one Sat.u.r.day night and burned an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic consequence, for one of the "common people," known as Robert, "was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear at Sunday School next day. This fall from grace occasioned intense remorse in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his mind for many months," records Martha More, "and despair seemed at length to take possession of him." Hannah had some conversation with him, and read him some suitable pa.s.sages from "The Rise and Progress". "At length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give him comfort."

Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in any way unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the letters of Sh.e.l.ley how his father tormented him with Archdeacon Paley's "Evidences" as a cure for atheism. This eminent churchman wrote a book, which he himself ranked first among his writings, called "Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Labouring Cla.s.ses of the British Public."

In this book he not merely proved that religion "smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a prospect which makes all earthly distinctions nothing"; he went so far as to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters were less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a day.

Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of the labouring part of mankind must be so called) imposes, are not hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a pleasure. It is an exercise of attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is successful, produces satisfaction....

This is lost among abundance.

And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement, and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot. Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion is to remind the poor

That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of G.o.d; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties, and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man's reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also exposed to many temptations from which the inferior cla.s.ses are happily exempted; that, "having food and raiment, they should be therewith content,"

since their situation in life, with all its evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of G.o.d; and finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the temporal well-being of political communities.

THE COURT CIRCULAR

The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this revolution was purely one of Church politics--in doctrine and ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America" remained in every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters." The only difference is that instead of being told "to honour and obey the King," they are told "to honour and obey the civil authority."

It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charleston.

Just as our ruling cla.s.ses have provided themselves with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and imitation English clothes--so in their Heaven they have provided an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book--not the English, but the st.u.r.dy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I read:

Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee, Casting down their golden crowns around the gla.s.sy sea; Cherubim and seraphim bowing down before Thee, Which wert, and art, and ever more shall be!

One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal imagery.

I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king," "throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn begins--

Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory; To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.

And the second--

Christ, whose glory fills the skies--

And the third--

Lord of all being, throned afar, Thy glory flames from sun and star.

There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous, greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious, punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family--not even the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low society.

This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off in his presence.

But see how he figures in the Court Circular:

The Son of G.o.d goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain:

His blood-red banner streams afar: Who follows in His train?

This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on earth; utterly simple and honest--he would not even let anyone praise him.