The War and the Churches Part 4

It is absurd to heap up all the contemporary instances of corruption in trade and politics, looseness in domestic life, and so on, unless you make a similar study of the vices and crimes of an earlier and more Christian generation, and carefully compare the two. It is not a question whether there is evil in our generation; it is a question whether there is more or less evil than in earlier generations. I must be pardoned for reiterating this, because, although this comparison is essential for forming an accurate judgment on the moral effect of the decay of Christianity, it is rarely inst.i.tuted with the least pretence of rigour. I have sufficiently studied it in earlier works (especially _The Bible in Europe_), and will not repeat the facts. Cotter Morison, whom I quoted on an early page, was wrong in his expectation. The change from Christian to humanist inspiration is taking place without disorder and with increasing advantage.

The solution of this apparent problem is really not obscure. If the genuine basis of human conduct needed an elaborate search--if it had to be revealed by a Deity or laboriously established by moral theologians or moral philosophers--no doubt the age of transition would be an age of disorder, and a very comprehensive educational organisation would be needed. But the true basis of human conduct is simple. There are, of course, Rationalists who feel that some very abstruse "science of ethics" has to be constructed as the solid foundation of conduct; but this has as little relation to the conduct of ordinary men as the learned pedants of the science of prosody have to ordinary speakers of prose. Experience is the real base and guide of conduct, and it forces itself on every man and woman, even on the child. "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you" is the first principle of morals; and to inculcate it you need neither the thunders of Jupiter nor the impressive abstractions of a science of ethics: nor do you need any moral genius or philosophical skill to discover it. It is a rule of life that suggests itself spontaneously. It is a natural and prompt expression of the fact that our life is social: our acts have the closest relation to others besides ourselves. Now and again, perhaps, a man is tempted to a.s.sert his own personality, or seek his own gratification, in such a way as to ignore his fellows; but he is usually arrested before long by the simple experience that he himself suffers from the actions of others just as they may suffer from his conduct. It is a lesson of life which one needs no power of a.n.a.lysis to learn.

And the chief reason why the abandonment of the old doctrines is proceeding without any moral degeneration is that this experience was really always the basis of general morality. We need not question--it would be absurd to question--that refined natures have received moral aid from their belief in the presence of G.o.d, or in a desire to please G.o.d by accepting the law of virtue as a declaration of his will; though we must be equally candid in admitting that men and women of this nature have not been observed to deteriorate when they sacrifice their religious beliefs, as thousands of them have done. On the other hand, we will hardly question that numbers of people of coa.r.s.er nature have been deterred from evil-doing by dread of supernatural punishment. It is, however, notorious in the moral history of Europe that these religious beliefs have been consistent with a vast amount of transgression of the decalogue: more than we witness in any civilised country in our own time. How, then, are we to discover what were the real springs of conduct in the ma.s.s of ordinarily decent people? It seems to me that the only accurate method is to avoid theories and consider people in the flesh. Do our Christian friends--did we ourselves in Christian days--refrain from lying, dishonesty, injustice, cruelty, and injury, solely or mainly because G.o.d forbids them or will punish them? I have not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its human and social value.

The only line of the decalogue about which there is likely to be any dispute in this regard is that putting restraint on s.e.xual relations. I have not to consider here a subject so remote from my immediate interest, and will observe only that any act which hurts either an individual or the social interest will as plainly come under a humanitarian law as the practice of lying: acts which inflict no injury and have been forbidden only on mystic grounds are not likely to remain on the moral code of the future. But I am concerned here with a definite issue, and need discuss general morality only in so far as that issue is affected.

Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of G.o.d have been totally ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of peace until a genuine human pa.s.sion was subst.i.tuted for that empty phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a struggle. The plain fact is that it was of no use, and is of no use to-day. There is, indeed, reason to think that we should make more progress if we entirely discarded figures of speech like "the brotherhood of men." The fact that we are all children of G.o.d, or children of Eve, or children of some Tertiary anthropoid, does not very obviously impose on us the duty not to take up arms in an international quarrel.

The ultimate basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy, though in an advanced social order this sentiment approves itself to the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality in the world when the word "morality," with all its mystic entanglements, is discarded, and we speak plainly of social law. Violence, the infliction of pain and injustice, is one of the most obvious infractions of social law, quite apart from any religious commandments. Its social evil is so obvious that the community has, at an early date in its development, elaborated a special machinery for restraining it, and has imposed penalties in this world, whatever it thinks about the next. There may be questions raised, and one can understand people who are confined to a religious environment feeling a genuine concern, about other sections of moral law; but it would be obviously absurd to think that a humanitarian ethic would fail here. There have been attempts in modern times to question the validity of ethical law altogether. In so far as this movement aims at stripping moral law of its mysticism and fearlessly investigating its traditional content, it is admirable and will grow; but in so far as these moral rebels would resent restraint of any kind, and p.r.o.nounce the freedom of every individual impulse, they seem to overlook a factor of great importance--the impulse of retaliation. A pretty state of society we should have if such a theory were generally, or largely, carried into practice.

But these are academic vagaries, like those of the mystic or the moral theologian. Whatever be the future fortune of Christian legends, men are not likely to sacrifice the peace and security of social life to such theories of freedom any more than they are likely to expose property to a general scramble. The instinct of sympathy is now growing deeper in every century. Most of the great improvements of social life (in its widest sense) during the nineteenth century, which we have inherited, were due to that development of sympathy. It matters not whether the reformer was Christian or non-Christian--Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale or Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill--the impulse was sympathy with suffering fellow-humans. All the hope of improvement in the twentieth century looks to a continued growth of that sentiment. It becomes a veritable pa.s.sion in certain natures, as long as there are large and cruel evils to redress; and this pa.s.sion of a few leading spirits, communicating something of its fire to the colder ma.s.s, is the great cause of progress. Surely that is the correct interpretation of the progressive life of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? Men realised that to cultivate sympathy because it was enjoined by religion was a more or less mercantile procedure: it was worth cultivating for its own sake.

Here we have the reply to those who, unfamiliar with any but their own religious environment, ask what place there will be for sympathy in an intellectual or nationalistic age. It is a very grave error to suppose either that our age is becoming less emotional or that Rationalism has no place for emotions. In pursuing its task during the nineteenth century Rationalism was an intensely emotional movement. Mr G. K.

Chesterton, in his _Victorian Age in Literature_, speaks of J. S. Mill's "hard rationalism in religion" and "hard egoism in ethics." Like very many other statements in that lamentable book, these are inexplicably unjust. Mill was so far from being "hard" in religion that he ended his days in a kind of sentimental theism; he was so far from being a "hard egoist" in ethics that he declared that he would burn in h.e.l.l for ever rather than lie at the supposed bidding of a Deity. Robert Ingersoll, the most popular Rationalist of that age, was--I judge from his private letters, not his ornate speeches--a man of the most tender and fine sentiment. It is simply ludicrous to suppose that, because we do not admit emotion to be a test of the accuracy of statements of fact (as all religious dogmas claim to be), we do not find any room for emotion in life. Is the whole of man's life an affirmation about reality or criticism of such affirmation? This supposed "hardness"--I detest these vague phrases, but one knows what is meant--of the Rationalist temper is one of the strangest myths the clergy have invented.

Reason not merely approves, but enjoins, the cultivation of sentiment.

When the sentiment in question is one that shows a power of transforming life and impelling men to struggle against pain and evil, reason applauds it as one of the most valuable forces we can cultivate. Such, plainly, is the sentiment of sympathy. We look back to-day with horror on the industrial and social condition of England in the earlier part of the nineteenth century: the burdened lives and few gross pleasures of the workers, the horrible cellar-homes of the poor, the ghastly treatment of child-workers, the stupid and brutal herding of criminals, the tragedies of asylums and workhouses, the fearful political corruption and despotism, the subjection of women, the revolting proportions of the birth-rate and death-rate. We have still much to do to redeem our civilisation from medieval errors, but when one contemplates the social revolution that human sympathy has brought about in the life of England, one feels that this, and not the long-futile teaching of Christianity, is the hope of the future. Christian preaching of virtue has been individualistic. Even in our time the clergy hesitate and are divided in face of social problems which plainly involve moral principles. But the humanitarian ethic is essentially social, and this pa.s.sion of sympathy is its chief root.

We wish, then, not to subst.i.tute any creed or organisation for Christianity, but to sweep away these primitive or medieval speculations about life, and let the human mind and human heart increasingly devote themselves, directly, to human interests. In discussing the question of peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts, in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for Horses, and a hundred such inst.i.tutions, and they will find contributors to these inst.i.tutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands of men writhe under hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the superfluous brutalities of war. They will see a generation shaken and shuddering as the ghastly picture is daily unfolded before it, and they will see that same generation in a few months grow dully indifferent to, if not actively supporting, the military system which invariably brings these horrors every few years upon the world. They will read of social aspiration spreading through our civilisation, and statesmen regretting that want of funds alone prevents them from remedying our social ills; and they will read how Europe in one year wasted in butchery the resources that might have renovated its disfigured civilisation, and the next year complacently shouldered its military burden, its annual waste of a thousand millions sterling, with the prospect of a costlier war than ever.

In face of this situation the question, What would you put in place of Christianity? is a mere mockery. One can see some pertinence and use in the question: How shall we induce the Christian Churches to employ their still great resources in helping to bring on the reign of peace? But it is not to them that we now look for redemption. It is to the humanitarian spirit, the clearer reason, of our age. I have described the situation in terms of emotion, because thus it spontaneously rises before me; but it may be recorded in terms of pure reason. We maintain in Europe a machinery for settling international quarrels which costs us more than a thousand millions sterling annually, while we could erect at a cost of a few thousands annually an efficient machinery for dealing with those quarrels, and for a few millions we could add the machinery for carrying out its decisions. We boast that our civilisation is founded on justice; yet, of the two types of machinery for adjusting quarrels, we retain the one that is the least possible adapted for securing the triumph of justice and discard the one that is pre-eminently fitted to secure it. We flatter ourselves that we rise above the savage in enjoying security of life and property, and we retain this system though we know that, periodically, it will invade life and property on a scale that surpa.s.ses the experience of the savage as much as a Dreadnought surpa.s.ses a canoe.

It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest.

Let us talk no more nonsense about needing religion to help us to get rid of this atrocious nightmare. It drives both reason and sentiment to the brink of insanity. Both protest against it with every particle of their energy. Why Christianity failed to protest against it in fifteen hundred years may or may not be obscure; but there is no obscurity whatever about the probable effect on militarism and war of a cultivation of reason and sympathy.[3]

Many a reform has been actually r.e.t.a.r.ded by the use of rhetoric. An outpour of vehement language seems to release, both in the speaker and in the a.s.senting audience, a part of that energy which ought to issue in action. It has been one of the grave blunders of the Churches that they thought their function ended with the eloquent announcement that men were brothers. We must be more practical. Now, while the imagination of the world is filled with the horrors of war, and sympathy is ready to fire us with a mighty energy, is one of the great opportunities of peace. One may trust that, after this experience, the Churches will awaken to the implications of their moral doctrine and set to work to impress it emphatically and repeatedly, as a moral duty, on their followers. It is, however, not impossible that, with all their scoutmasters and chaplains and services of thanksgiving for victory, a very large part of the clergy will find themselves so closely allied with militarism when the war is over, so confused in their appreciation of what it has done for us, that they will continue to mumble only general principles and halting counsels. In any case, in the cities and large towns of this kingdom, where are found the effective controllers of our destiny, the majority do not any longer sit at the feet of the clergy. Precise statistical observation has shown this.

Let us remember that the one task before us is to inspire the _majority_ in each civilised nation with a determination that the system shall end.

The only practical difficulty of considerable magnitude is the economic difficulty: the disorganisation of the industrial world by suppressing war-industries and large standing armies. It is, however, foolish to regard this as an obstacle to disarmament, since--to put an extreme case--it would be more profitable to a nation to maintain these men in idleness than run the risk of another war. For disarmament itself what is needed is that half a dozen, at least, of the great Powers shall agree to submit _all_ quarrels to arbitration, and reduce their armies to the proportions of an international police, at the service of the international tribunal and for use (under its permit) against lower peoples who turn aggressive. No one doubts that this can be done when the Powers agree to do it. But for one reason or other, which I need not discuss, the Governments will probably not do this until a majority of the electorate indicate a resolute demand for it. The immediate task is to secure this majority by education; and the work of education will be best conducted by vast non-sectarian peace-organisations. The mixture of futile Christian phraseology and genuine humanitarian interests in some of these movements has been hitherto a grave disadvantage. The movement has been compelled to split into sectarian branches, and has proportionately lost efficacy. If the clergy insist on winning prestige for themselves, or respect and recognition for their doctrines, by acting in these bodies, they are again hampering the work of reform. A great national agitation, linked with similar agitations in other lands, avoiding Christian formulae as well as anti-Christian reproaches, will alone secure the object.

I confess--with ardent hope that I may be wrong--that I expect no immediate realisation of the reform. It may take years, even after the grim lesson that militarism has given us, to inspire the majority of our people with an unsleeping and irresistible demand, and the work will grow more arduous as the memory of the hardships of the war fades. On the day on which I write this I have listened to the conversation, in a train, of a wealthy, refined, and cultivated Churchwoman. "I said to my son when he set out," she observed, with a laugh, to her neighbour, "that it was far better for him to get shot than to die of diphtheria or something at home." If that sentiment, that obtuseness to the ma.s.sive horrors of war even when a son was involved, is widespread, the outlook is dark. One fears that it is not very promising.

The lady I quote would read these pages, if she could constrain herself to do so, with a genuine shudder. Abandon Christianity! She would volubly reel off the eloquent forecasts of the doom of society which she has heard from a hundred pulpits. Meantime she is one of the gravest obstacles (as a type of her cla.s.s) to the removal from society of one of its most crushing burdens and most criminal usages. To me her cla.s.s ill.u.s.trates the limitations of Christianity, and it confirms me in the belief that we shall make more rapid progress without it. She was a lady of keen sympathies and of great activity for others: the kind of woman who, as she would put it, practised her Christianity. Yet in face of this mighty disorder she showed at once the failure of Christianity and the reason of it. Her genuine human sympathy was directed by an ancient and outworn code of duties. Where Christianity had delivered no clear message, the expanding of her sympathy was barred. War was part of the established order of things. She could even cheat her maternal sentiment with thin fallacies, because they reconciled her to what the Church had not condemned. She had never seen the vision of peace, never grasped the comparatively easy alternative to war.

This, in general terms, is what one means by the expectation that a surrender of Christian doctrines will certainly not check the growth of sympathy, and is more likely to promote it. It will direct itself spontaneously to departments of suffering to which the Church had not directed it. But we should be foolish to rely on this free growth and spontaneous application of sympathy. It must be cultivated: our generation must be educated to a sense of its value. As far as the child is concerned, the need is plain. Children do not merely have veins of cruelty; they have, as comparative psychology knows, the blood and impulses of primitive man. The general impulse of a healthy boy is to exact an eye for an eye: the impulse which it is the supreme care of a modern State to curb in its citizens. To educate such children in military history, whether of ancient Jews or medieval Englishmen or modern Germans, is, as William II knows, the best means of maintaining war. As to the New Testament, its language is not addressed to children, its sentiments are often so obviously impracticable that it defeats the end of education, and its precepts and counsels are so emphatically based on a disputable reward in heaven that their ethic savours of a risky commercial speculation. We must abandon "Bible lessons," and teach children to be human.

But for the work of education to end when the child leaves the school is one of the crudities of our elementary civilisation. The human material is just becoming fit for the efforts of the educator when the child leaves school, yet from that moment we leave it to the casual and largely pernicious influences of its environment. Some day, perhaps, our education department will be more seriously concerned about the youth and the adult than about impressing a few facts of history and geography on the memory of the child: even if it did no more than organise and direct the innumerable foundations and voluntary organisations which actually exist, and bring them into living and practical contact with our splendid museums and libraries and art-collections, a vast amount could be done in the education of the adult. Meantime a persistent, comprehensive, intensely earnest propaganda of peace is needed. Since I wrote a little work on those lines in 1899 I have had fifteen years'

experience of preaching the gospel of peace, and know well how convincing are its arguments and how little it has to overcome except inertia. We need only to help the imagination of the ma.s.s of people; to put clearly before them the comparative easiness and the incalculable value of the change. Christianity has not tried and failed; it has not even tried. It has wasted its resources in generalities which have proved wholly futile. We must speak as men to men; and men will be more open to conviction when we plead that, not the supposed commands of a Galilean preacher of nineteen hundred years ago, but their own highest and most sacred instincts, bid them lay down their arms and inaugurate the age of international peace.

[Footnote 1: _The Service of Man_ (_6d._ edition), p. 16.]

[Footnote 2: As I write, the Press describes Canon Green of Burnley as saying that "the war is a divine judgment on the world--England for the last ten years has been G.o.d-forgetting, drunken, immoral."]

[Footnote 3: Let me again guard myself against misrepresentation. Were I of military age, I should to-day be in the trenches. The men who, as long as the military system is retained, expose their lives in our defence have my entire respect and grat.i.tude. It is the system I impugn.]