Part 3
It ought to be quite easy for you to come to a clear understanding with yourselves. Take down the New Testament and read it. Read it as closely and carefully as you read your cheap newspapers, and with as much eagerness to find out “news.” For news there is in it, and of grave import. Not news affecting the things of this world, which pass like a breath of wind and are no more,--but news which treats of Eternal Facts, outlasting the creation and re-creation of countless worlds. Read this book for yourselves, I say, rather than take it in portions on Sundays only from your clergy,--and devote your earnest attention to the simple precepts uttered by Christ Himself. If you are a Christian, you believe Christ was an Incarnation of God,--then does it not behove you to listen when God speaks? Or is it a matter of indifference to you that the Maker and Upholder of millions of universes should have condescended to come and teach you how to live? If it is, then stand forth and let us see you! Do not attend places of worship merely to be noticed by your neighbours. For,--apart from such conduct being strictly forbidden by Christ,--you insult other persons by your presence as a liar and hypocrite. This is what you may call a “rude” statement; plain-speaking and truth-telling are always called “rude.” You will find the utmost plain-speaking in the Gospels upon which you profess to pin your faith. If you have any “fancy Ritualism” lurking about you, you will discover that “forms” are not tolerated by the Saviour of mankind.
“All their works they do for to be seen of men; they make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments.”
“Shows” of religion are severely censured and condemned by Him whose commands we assume to try and obey,--we can scarcely find even a peg whereon to hang an excuse for our practice of praying in public, while “vain repetitions” of prayer are expressly prohibited. We shall find nothing in the New Testament to condone the “evening dress” services of a certain West-end clergyman, who shall be nameless;--or to countenance “dramatic” recitations from the steps of a Church chancel, by an actress standing boldly there with her back to the Communion Table. I repeat--Read the Four Gospels; they are very much mis-read in these days, and even in the Churches are only gabbled. See if your private and personal lives are in keeping with the commands there set down. If not, cease to play Humbug with the Eternities;--they will avenge themselves upon your hypocrisy in a way you dream not of! “Whosoever excuses himself accuses himself.”
The true Christian faith has no dogma,--no form--no sect. It starts with Christ as God-in-man, in an all-embracing love for God and His whole Creation, with an explicit and clear understanding (as symbolized so emphatically in the Crucifixion and Resurrection) that each individual soul is an immortal germ of life, in process of eternal development, to which each new “experience” of thought, whether on this planet or others, adds larger powers, wider intelligence, and intensified consciousness. There are no “isms” in this faith--no bigotry, and no intolerance. It leaves no ground for discussion.
“This is my commandment,--That ye love one another as I have loved you.”
It is all there,--simple, straight, and pure--no more, no less than this.
“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility. It is, therefore, able to undertake all things, and it completes many things and warrants them to take effect where he who does not love would faint and lie down. Love is watchful, and, sleeping, slumbereth not. Though weary, it is not tired; though alarmed, it is not confounded, but, as a lively flame and burning torch, it forces its way upwards, and securely passes all.... Love is born of God and cannot rest but in God, above all created things.”
Is OUR Gospel of modern life and society to-day one of love or hate? Do we help each other more readily than we kick each other down? Are we more eager to say kind things of each other or cruel? Do we prefer to praise or to slander our neighbours? Is it not absolutely true that “a cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run?” Can we leave anybody alone without covert or open detraction from his or her merits? Even in the most ordinary, every-day life do we not see people taking a malicious, insane delight in making their next-door neighbours as uncomfortable as possible in every petty way they can? These persons, by the way, are generally the class who go to Church most regularly, and are constant Communicants. Do they not by their profane attempt to assimilate the malignity of their dispositions with the gospel of Christ, deserve to be considered as mere blasphemers of the Faith?
Yet, as a matter of fact, it is much easier to love than to hate. Love is the natural and native air of the immortal soul. “While we fulfil the law of love in all our thoughts and actions, we cannot fail to grow.” Hatred, discontent, envy, and pessimism cramp all the higher faculties of the mind, and very often actually breed disease in the body. To love all creation is to draw the responsive health and life of creation into one’s own immortal cognizance. “Love easily loosens all our bonds. There is no discomfort that will not yield to its sovereign power.” But it must not be a selfish love. It must be that Love which is the keynote of the Christian Faith--“Love one another as I have loved you.”
It follows very plainly that if we truly loved one another there would be no wars, no envyings, no racial hatreds, no over-reaching of our brethren for either wealth, place, or power. There would be no such hells as the Lancashire factories, for example, where, as Allen Clarke graphically tells us,[1] “Amidst that sickening jerry-jumble of cheap bricks and cheaper British industry, over a hundred thousand men, women, and children toil and exist, sweating in the vast, hot, stuffy mills and sweltering forges--going, when young, to the smut-surrounded schools to improve their minds, and trying to commune with the living God in the dreary, dead, besmirched churches and grimy puritanical chapels; growing up stunted, breeding thoughtlessly, dying prematurely, knowing not, nor dreaming, except for here and there a solitary one cursed with keen sight and sensitive soul, of aught better and brighter than this shrieking, steaming sphere of slime and sorrow.” Contrast this picture with a crowded “supper night” at the Carlton or any other fashionable Feeding-place of London, and then maintain, if you dare, that the men and women who are responsible for two such differing sides of life are “Christians.”
England is, I am told, at the present juncture in danger of becoming “Romanized.” Priests and nuns of various “orders,” who have been thrust out of France and Spain for intermeddling, are seeking refuge here, in company with the organ-grinders and other folk who have been found unnecessary in their own countries. From Paris official news was cabled on September 11th as follows:--
JESUIT EXODUS FROM FRANCE.
PARIS, Wednesday, _September 11th_.
It is announced officially that by the 1st of next month not a single Jesuit will be left in France. Most of them are emigrating to England, and will make Canterbury their headquarters.--DALZIEL.
France will not have the Jesuits; may it be asked why we are to have them? It is England’s proud privilege to be an international workhouse for all the decrepit of the world, and for this cause a happy hunting ground is open to Rome among these same decrepit. There is no creed in the world which is better adapted for those who are morally weak and frightened of themselves. All the millionaires who have gotten their goods by fraud, can, by leaving the greater part of these goods to Rome, secure a reserved seat in Rome’s Heaven, with a special harp and crown. All the women with “soul-affinities” other than lawful, can, after a considerable wallow in social mire, enter the Church of Rome, and after confession, be “cleansed” sufficiently to begin again a new life approved of the saints. All the spiritualists and faith-healers can find support for their theories with Rome,--and the Roman hell, full of large snakes and much brimstone, is a satisfactory place to consign one’s enemies to, when we have quite put aside Christ’s command, “Love one another.” Altogether Romanism is calculated to appeal to a very large majority of persons through the sensuous and emotional beauty of its ritual;--it is a kind of heavenly narcotic which persuades the believer to resign his own will into the hypnotic management of the priests. The church is made gorgeous with soft lights and colours,--glorious music resounds through the building, and the mind drowses gently under the influence of the Latin chanting, which we need not follow unless we like,--we are permitted to believe that a large number of saints and angels are specially looking after us, and the sweet Virgin Mary is ever ready with outstretched hands to listen to all our little griefs and vexations. It is a beautiful and fascinating creed, hallowed by long antiquity, graced by deeds of romance and chivalry, sanctified by the memories of great martyrs and pure saints, and even in these degenerate days, glorified by the noble-hearted men and women who follow it without bigotry or intolerance, doing good everywhere, tending the sick, comforting the sorrowful, and gathering up the little children into their protecting arms, even as Jesus Himself gathered them. It would need an angel’s pen dipped in fire to record the true history of a faithful, self-denying priest of the Roman Church, who gives up his own advantage for the sake of serving others--who walks fearlessly into squalid dens reeking with fever, and sets the pure Host between the infected lips of the dying,--who combats with the Demon of Drink, and drags up the almost lost reprobate out of that horrible chasm of vice and destruction. No one could ever give sufficient honour to such a man for all the immense amount of good he does, unostentatiously and without hope of reward. But many men like himself exist equally in the English Church as the Roman,--in the Presbyterian Church, in the Greek Church, in the Buddhist temples, among the Quakers, “Plymouth Brethren,” and other sects--among the followers of Mahomet or of Confucius. For there are good men and good women in every Church, faithful to the SPIRIT OF CHRIST, and therefore, “Christians,” even if called Jews or Hindoos.
Personally, I have no more objection or dislike to Romanism than I have to any other “ism” ever formulated. From a student’s point of view I admire the Roman Catholic priesthood, because they understand their business, and thoroughly know the material with which they have to deal. Wise as their Egyptian prototypes of old, they decline to unveil “mysteries” to the uninitiated vulgar--therefore the laity are not expected to read the Bible for themselves. Knowing the terrors of a guilty conscience, they are able to intimidate the uneducated ruffian of both sexes more successfully than all the majesty of the law. Thoroughly aware of the popular delight in “shows,” they organize public processions on feast days, just as the “Masters of the Stars” used to do in Memphis, where, by the way (as those who take the trouble to study ancient Egyptian records will discover), our latest inventions, such as the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, and many other modern utilities were used by the priests for “miraculous” effects. From the Egyptian priesthood we derive the beginnings of scientific discovery;--to the early Roman Catholic priesthood we owe the preservation of much history and learning. The one is, intellectually speaking, a lineal descendant of the other, and both deserve the utmost respect for their immense capacity as Rulers of the Ignorant.
The greater majority of persons have no force of will and no decided opinions, but only an undersense of coward fear or vexation at the possible unsuccessful or damaging result of their own ill-doings. Hence the power of the Roman Catholic dogma. It is not Christianity, it has not the delicate subtlety of Greek mythology, it is simply Pagan Rome engrafted on the conversion and repentance of the Jew, Peter, who, in the time of trial, “knew not the Man.” Curiously enough, it is just the “Man,” the real typical Christ, the pure, strong God-in-humanity who is still “not known” in the Roman Catholic ritual. There are prayers to the “Sacred Heart” and to other physical attributes of Jesus,--just as in old Rome there were prayers to the physical attributes of the various deities, but of the perfect “Man,” as seen in Christ’s dauntless love of truth and exposure of shams, His scourging of the thieves out of the holy temple, His grand indifference to the world’s malice and hatred, and his conquest over death and the grave,--of these things we are given no clear or helpful image. Nevertheless, it is the “Man” we most need,--the “Man” who came to us to teach us how to live;--the brother, the friend, the close sympathizer,--the great Creator of all life mingling Himself with his human creation in a beautiful, tender, loving, wise, and all-pitiful Spirit, wherein is no hate, no revenge, and no intolerance! This is the Christ;--this is His Christianity. Romanism, on the contrary, allows plenty of space for those who want to hate as well as to love, and it is as helpful or as useless as any of the thousand and one dogmas built up around Christ which include bad passions as well as divine aspirations. The danger of such a creed gaining too much ground in England, the land where our forefathers fought against it and trampled it out with their own blood and tears, is not because it is a particular form of religious faith, but because it is an intolerant system of secret government. This has been proved over and over again throughout history. Its leaders have not shown themselves as gentle as pagans by any means, either now or in the past, and intolerance in any form, from any sect, is no part of the Constitution of a free country.
Hence the real cause of the objection entertained by millions of persons in the Empire to the suggested alteration of the King’s Coronation oath. Edward VII. is a Constitutional monarch,--and the words “Defender of the Faith” imply that he is equally Defender of the Constitution. He agrees, when he is crowned King of England, to uphold that Constitution,--he therefore tacitly rejects all that might tend to undermine it, all secret methods of tampering with political, governmental, or financial matters relating to the State. The wording of the Coronation Oath is and must be distinctly offensive to thousands of excellent persons who are Roman Catholics,--nevertheless, in the times when it was so worded, the offending terms were made necessary by the conduct of the Roman Catholics themselves. Those times, we are assured, are past. We have made progress in education,--we are now broad-minded enough to be fair to foes as well as to friends. We should, therefore, in common courtesy to a rival Church, consent to have this irritating formula altered. Perhaps we should,--but is it too much to ask our Roman Catholic brethren that they also, should, if they wish for tolerance, exhibit it on their own side? When our good and beloved Queen Victoria died, was it not quite as offensive on the part of Pope Leo to publicly state that he “could not be represented at the funeral of a Protestant Queen”--as it may be for our King to publicly repudiate the service of the Mass? Nothing could have been more calculated to gratuitously wound the feelings of a great People than that most unnecessary announcement made from an historical religious centre like the Vatican at a time of universal grief for the death of a great Monarch. If the Pope’s act was according to the rule of his Church, the King’s oath will be taken according to the rule of the British Constitution. No one could accuse the Pope of any particularly “Christian” feeling in declining to be represented at the last obsequies of the best Queen that ever reigned--no one can or will accuse King Edward of “religious intolerance” if he takes the oath as it is set down for him. Both acts are matters of policy. When we have the foremost peer of England, the Duke of Norfolk, forgetting himself so far as to drag his religious creed into the political arena and express the hope on behalf of all English Catholics that the Pope may soon regain temporal power (which means, to put it quite plainly, that the British Constitution should be disintegrated and laid under subjection to Rome), the natural consequence of such conduct is that an enormous majority of perfectly sensible, broad-minded people doubt whether it is wise to leave an entirely loose rein on the neck of the papal Pegasus, and whether it will not be as well, after all, to allow the Coronation oath to be spoken by Edward VII. as Victoria, of ever glorious memory, spoke it? For tolerance and equity on the one side must be met by tolerance and equity on the other, if a fair understanding is to be arrived at. And when the professors of any religious Creed still persecute heroism and intellect, as personated in the grand and venerable figure of Tolstoy, or refuse reverence to the last rite of a noble Queen, whose reign was a blessing to the whole world, one may be permitted to question their fitness for the task of elevating and refining the minds and morals of those whom their teachings help to influence. And having, as a man of intellectual and keen perception, the full consciousness that such unuttered “questioning” was burning the hearts and minds of thousands, Cardinal Vaughan showed himself a master of the art of Roman Catholic diplomacy in his speech at Newcastle-on-Tyne on September 9th. Speaking of the inrush of Roman Catholic priests into England, he said:--
“A statement from a London paper has been running through the provincial Press to the effect that I have deliberately outraged public feeling by inviting to England certain French religieux, some of those _confrères_ who have made themselves particularly obnoxious by their constant attacks upon this country. The fact is that, upon the passing of the iniquitous law against the religious congregations, I gave a general invitation to any religieux who might wish to come to my diocese until they could return to France. Among those who applied were three or four fathers, some of those _confrères_ who do not love England. My invitation being general, I was not, and am not going to make distinctions. None will come who do not intend to obey the laws and follow my direction. And if there be any who have not been sufficiently enlightened to appreciate this country while living in France, they are the very people who had best come and make our acquaintance. This is the surest way to change their views. But while England boasts of her generous hospitality to every kind of refugee, I shall certainly offer whatever hospitality I can to the men and women who have suffered for Christ’s sake. _I am too broad an Englishman to know any other policy._”
“Broad Englishman” as the Cardinal may be, he had no pity on the aged Dr. St. George Mivart, the circumstances of whose treatment are not yet forgotten.
Speaking of the King’s oath, the Cardinal said--“I entirely and frankly accept the decision of the country that the King must be a Protestant. They believe that this is in some way bound up with the welfare of the Empire. WITHOUT GOING THIS LENGTH, I am convinced that in the present condition of the English people, HAUNTED AS THEY ARE BY FEARS AND SUSPICIONS, it is expedient that the King should be of the religion of the overwhelming majority. Besides, the King being, in virtue of Royal supremacy, head of the State Church, it is impossible that he should be other than a Protestant. Catholics have no difficulty in paying most loyal allegiance to a Protestant Sovereign. In this they seem to be of more liberal and confiding temper than those who would refuse allegiance to a King unless he professed their creed. The Catholic has no difficulty, because he gives his allegiance and his life, when needed, primarily to the civil power ordained of God.”
(The Cardinal did not pause here to try and explain why God has “ordained” a Protestant sovereign instead of a Roman Catholic one. Yet no doubt he will admit that God knows best.)
“The Sovereign REPRESENTS THIS POWER, whatever be his religion. Was it not Catholic Belgium that placed the Protestant King Leopold upon the Throne, and gave to him at least as hearty a devotion as ever has been shown to his Catholic successor? Other Catholic States are ruled by Protestant Sovereigns. And who can say that the 16,000,000 of German Catholics are a whit less loyal to their German Protestant Emperor than the millions who are of the Protestant or of no religion? There are people, I believe, pursued by the conviction that we Catholics would do anything in the world to get a Catholic King upon the Throne; that the Pope would give us leave to tell lies, commit perjury, plot, scheme, and kill to any extent for such a purpose; that there is no crime we should stick at if the certainty, or even the probability of accomplishing such an end were in view. Now let me put it to our Protestant friends in this way. If the King of England were an absolute Monarch, the dictator of the laws to be enacted, and his own executive, there might be something of vital importance to our interests and to those of religion to excite in us an intense desire to have a Catholic King. Though even then the end could never, even remotely, justify the means suggested. But how do matters really stand? We have a constitutional Monarch who is subject to the laws and in practice bound to follow the advice of his Ministers. A Catholic King, under present circumstances, would be a cause of weakness, of perpetual difficulty, and of untold anxiety. We are far better off as we are. Our dangers and grievances, our hopes and our happiness, LIE IN THE WORKING OF THE CONSTITUTION, not in the favour or power of any Sovereign. IT IS THE PARLIAMENT, THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, THAT WE MUST CONVERT, or at least strive to retain within the influence of Christianity. For the well-being of this country and the salvation of its people depend, above all other human things, UPON THE VIEW THAT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS CAN BE GOT TO TAKE OF ITS DUTY--to respect and obey the law of Christ. What we want is to get the House of Commons to maintain the Christian laws of marriage as the basis of society, and to secure to parents and their children a true and proper liberty in the matter of Christian education. And in this, remember well THAT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS DEPENDS NOT UPON THE KING, WHATEVER HIS RELIGION, BUT UPON OURSELVES. The people of this country must work out their own salvation. And here let me point out to you, in passing, that THE NEXT SESSION OF PARLIAMENT MAY SETTLE FOR EVER THE POSITION OF CHRISTIANITY IN THIS COUNTRY. Secondary and middle-class education will be thrown into the melting-pot. In the process of the devolution of educational authority upon county councils, Christianity will run the risk of losing rights which it seems to have almost secured under the working of the Education Department. The adoption of a single clause or principle will have far-reaching and most vital results. There will be another educational struggle. Struggles will be inevitable until the Christian cause, which is becoming more and more openly the cause of the majority, has permanently triumphed.”
Here we have four distinct “moves” on the plan of campaign.
1. “It is the Parliament, the House of Commons, that we must convert.”