Part 8

But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of good, he may quite creditably, in a strict sense of the word, start an attack upon Society, or upon great social institutions, and seek to bring them to dissolution. Such a course of action may be arrogant, or may have an insufficient basis of fact, but it is not discreditable. Rather does it prove the man’s faith in his professions. History gives record of many such characters, and posterity has approved of deeds which in their own day were regarded as violent, arrogant, and unjustifiable.

Martin Luther attacked a far greater social institution of his own day than was comprised under any single form of government. He attacked something much bigger than the English or the American Constitution. In deciding to attack it he was more arrogant (if single unorganised action against large and organised numbers be the proof of arrogance) than you or I could be if we attacked any institution to-day that you like to name, even the institution of war. Now, the result of that great attack was that it succeeded--not unconditionally, not universally, but (broadly speaking) racially and territorially. About one-third of Europe was conquered by it; and about two-thirds remain to this day--not indeed unaffected, but certainly not conquered by Lutheranism. If you are to judge of sacred causes by mere numbers, there are still more nominal Catholics than nominal Protestants in the world; and, therefore, by numbers, up to date Luther is condemned.

Luther’s real conquest--the thing that he really did bring about, and in which numbers are now on his side, would have horrified him. Luther was the root-cause why there are to-day more nominal Christians in the world who pick and choose doctrines to suit their own taste, than Christians who submissively take their doctrines wholesale from others whether from Luther or from Rome. It is due to Luther, as much as to anybody, that so many Roman Catholics who have no leanings to Lutheranism, are only nominal Catholics. Luther, that is to say, has brought into existence an enormous number of discreditable Christians who will not openly admit that they are free-thinkers.

You have clergy of the Church of England, for instance, who read themselves into their pulpits with the Thirty-nine Articles, and do not believe half of them.

The average young man who enters the ministry of the Church of England has been reasonably mothered by a university education; and when he takes the plunge it is not total immersion. His mother--his Alma Mater--still holds him by the heel. It is in consequence, with a sort of heel of Achilles that he enters upon divinity; and over this he draws a stocking with a large hole in it just where the wear of the heel comes hardest. That stocking (containing forty stripes save one) is the Thirty-nine Articles. It has been loosely knit, it is warranted to shrink the longer he wears it, and the hole in consequence gets larger.

There you have the weakness of the Church of England. Nobody to-day in his senses is prepared to die for the Thirty-nine Articles. Yet to hold ministry in the Church he has to swear by them, and thus at the very beginning of his ministerial career discreditable conduct is imposed on him.

It is no wonder that upon that basis the Church of England is permeated with unbelief in the things that it professes. A Church, a religion, may be full of credulity, bigotry, superstition--and with all those things it may yet have a true and a living faith: it may breed martyrs and inquisitors in equal numbers and with equal facility; but, in order to do so it must have at its back something definite and distinctive that its members are prepared to die for. And if it has not that, it is bound to become before long a discredited institution.

It is an interesting and a hopeful trait in human nature that it will only believe obstinately, continuously, and in spite of persecution, in those things which seem greatly to matter. When they no longer seem to matter, belief falls away from them. And, broadly speaking, we have come to see that things do not greatly matter unless they affect life and conduct.

“The Kingdom of Heaven” is within you; and if your doctrinal test does not produce good ethical results, you begin to doubt--not the Kingdom of Heaven--but the doctrine on which it was made to depend.

Similarly, if a doctrine obviously lays itself open to grave abuse, or presents strong temptation to the infirmities of human nature, you begin to doubt whether it is so heavenly in origin as it pretends to be.

The doctrine held by some cannibal African tribe that the bride’s mother shall provide the wedding-breakfast in her own person, is so clearly a truckling to the prejudice against mothers-in-law--which exists even in this country--that such a religious tenet immediately becomes suspect, and we guess that it emanates not from the gods but from their maker, man.

Notice, too, how the gradual displacement of miracle has been brought about. So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping, and criminal instincts of the human race--that, from the social point of view, they opened a way for the terrorising of the weak, for fraud, for covetousness, for murder, for theft--in a word for priest-craft in all its worst forms.

The belief in miracle enabled Samuel, with his punitive threats of divine vengeance, to terrorise first Eli and then Saul, and bring Israel to such a pass under his priestly government that at no period of that people’s early history were they more in subjection to their enemies.

The belief in miracle enabled Elisha to cajole Elijah into the wilderness and there murder him, persuading subsequent inquirers that he had gone up to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Everybody believed him except the children; and when they mocked him and told him to go and do likewise, he threatened that bears would come and eat them. And Scripture, as a warning to us against like conduct, tells us that they did.

That is how miracle was played under the old dispensation; and (as long as it could possibly be maintained) under the new also. Then, as the bad social results of a belief in miracles became accumulatively apparent--when carried outside the canon of Scripture into contemporary life--then it began to dawn upon some people how bad also a belief in them was for the mind of man in relation to the Deity. It began to be seen that the institution of a law of nature (in conjunction with an arbitrary suspension thereof whenever divinely convenient) was not compatible with what men have now come to regard as “moral conduct.” It was literally “discreditable”; for it made men disbelieve the law of their own being. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand a man was to be guided by experience, by thought, reason, and conscience--by a belief in cause and effect. Then--in the off case--unreason and inexperience were to descend upon him like a thunderbolt, and either beat him to dust, or lift him, an ingenuously amazed Ganymede to the seats of bliss.

Now, we may admit--indeed we must--that there are many mysteries and secrets of nature which man has not yet fathomed; there may be many of which as yet he has no suspicion. A sudden exhibition of any of those powers and mysteries might even to-day seem “miraculous.” When in the past some fortuitous circumstance brought them about, “miracle” was the only explanation of them which human understanding was able to offer.

But now we are coming more and more to believe that if blind men have suddenly received their sight it has not been by miracle but by law; if faith has removed mountains literally, or caused the sun and the moon to stand still, it has done so by reliance on sources which lay hitherto untapped in the general order of things, and implicit ever since the creative scheme was established. For if any other explanation is to be offered, then the work of creation is discredited, and the meaning and the moral values of those processes which we sum up in the word “life” become cheapened, because we can no longer regard them as a law, but only as a sort of police-regulation, arbitrary, capricious, and provocative of misconduct, in that we are unable to depend upon them, or to have any guarantee that they will be impartially administered.

Miracle discredits the ordered scheme of creation; and quite as much does it do so if you believe creation to be the work of a personal Deity. Creation (science shows us more and more) was from its inception a process of absolutely related causes and effects--a whole system reared up through millions and millions of years upon a structure involving infinite millions of lives and deaths--and the whole a perfect sequence of causal happenings.

That is “life” as it is presented to man’s reason and understanding; and if his reason and understanding are not to faint utterly, he must in his search for a moral principle “find God (as the Psalmist puts it) in the land of the living,” or not at all. For as he estimates the moral value of things solely by that empyric sense which has been evolved in him through a faithful recognition of the inevitable laws of cause and effect, so must he become demoralised, if he is to be taught that what he has regarded as inevitable can be capriciously suspended by a power independent of those laws which life has taught him to reverence.

Do not think, for a moment, that I am questioning the power of faith or the power of prayer. It is a tenable proposition that they are the most tremendous power in the world; and yet we may hold that they take effect through the natural law alone, and have come into existence through the courses of evolution--or, if you like to put it so--in a faithful following of the Will which, in the act of Creation, made a compact and kept it.

But if the compact of Creation was not kept, if that impact of spirit upon matter (which through such vast eras and through such innumerable phases of life worked by cause and effect) was ever tampered with so that cause and effect were suspended, then the whole process becomes discredited to our moral sense, and its presiding genius is discredited also.

Are we to suppose that through the earlier millions of years, when only the elementary forms of life were present upon this globe, cause and effect went on unsuspended and unhindered, and that these processes, having once been started (engendered, let us assume, by the Immanent Will), held absolute sway over the development of life for millions and millions of years, until a time came when humanity appeared, and the idea of religion and a Deity entered the world; and that this process then became subject to a dethronement? Are we to believe that then intervention in a new form, and upon a different basis (not of cause and effect) began to take place? If that is the proposition, then, it seems to me, we are asked (having accepted the idea of a Creator) to impute to Him discreditable conduct--to believe that a point came in these causal processes which He had instituted when He could no longer “play the game” without arbitrary interference with its rules, and that the appearance of man upon the globe was the signal for a fatal weakening to His character.

I have seen a clergyman cheat at croquet. He was the by-word of the neighbourhood for that curious little weakness; but I assure you that the spectacle of that reverend gentleman surreptitiously pushing his ball into better position with his foot instead of depending upon the legitimate use of his mallet, was no more ignoble a spectacle than that which I am asked to contemplate by believers in miracle when they present to my eyes a Deity who (upon their assertion) does similar things.

Test upon this basis of morality the most crucial of all events in Christian theology.

The idea of the Incarnation of God in human form as the final and logical fulfilment of the Creative purpose and process--the manifestation of the Creator in the created--has had for many great thinkers a very deep attraction. But if the process which brings Him into material being--the so-called Virgin-Birth--is not a process implicit in Nature itself and one that only depends for its realisation on man’s grasp of the higher law which shall make it natural and normal to the human race--if the Virgin-Birth is miracle instead of perfectly conditioned law revealing itself, then, surely, such a device for bringing about the desired end is “discreditable conduct”--because it discredits that vast system of evolution through cause and effect which we call “life.” From such an Incarnation I am repulsed as from something monstrous and against nature; and the doings and sayings of a being so brought into the world are discredited by the fact of a half-parentage not in conformity with creative law.

Now when one ventures to question the moral integrity of so fundamental a religious doctrine, and to give definite grounds as to why adverse judgment should be passed on it, there will not be lacking theologians ready to turn swiftly and rend one something after this manner: “Who are you, worm of a man, to question the operations of the Eternal mind, or dare to sit in judgment on what God your maker thinks good?”

The answer is “I don’t. It is only your interpretation of those operations that I question.” But on that head there is this further to say: “By the Creative process God has given to man a reasoning mind; and it is only by the use of the reason so given him that man can worship his Maker.” To give man the gift of reason and then to take from him the right fully to exercise it, is discreditable conduct.

That tendency I attribute not to the Deity but to the theologian--more especially as I read in the Scriptures that where God had a special revelation to make to a certain prophet who thought a prostrate attitude the right one to assume under such circumstances, divine correction came in these words, “Stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee.” Some people seem to think that the right attitude is to stand upon their heads.

It is told in some Early Victorian memoirs that a group of Oxford dons were discussing together the relations of mortal man to his God, and one postulated that the only possible attitude for man to assume in such a connection was that of “abject submission and surrender.” But even in that dark epoch such a doctrine was not allowed to go unquestioned. “No, no,” protested another, “deference, not abject submission.” And though it is a quaint example of the Oxford manner, surely one must agree with it. Reason being man’s birthright, “Stand upon thy feet and I will speak to thee,” is the necessary corollary. Even if there be such a thing as divine revelation--the revelation must be convincing to man’s reason, and not merely an attack upon his nerves, or an appeal to his physical fears.

Similarly any form of government or of society which does not allow reason to stand upon its feet and utter itself unashamed is a discreditable form of discipline to impose, if reason is to be man’s guide.

Now I do not know whether, by characterising the device of a “miraculous” birth as discreditable to its author, I am not incurring the penalty of imprisonment in a country which says that it permits free thought and free speech (at all events in peace-time). A few years ago a man was sent to prison--I think it was for three months--for saying similar things: a man who was a professed unbeliever in Divinity. And quite obviously the discreditable conduct in that case was not of the man who acted honestly up to his professions, but of this country which, professing one thing, does another. And the most discreditable figure in the case was the Home Secretary who, though entirely disapproving of this legal survival of religious persecution, and with full power to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy which has now become his perquisite, refused to move in the matter, and said he saw no reason for doing so. His discredit was, of course, shared by the Cabinet, by Parliament and by the Country--which (without protest except from a few distinguished men of letters and leaders of religious thought) allowed that savage sentence to stand on grounds so antiquated and so inconsistent with our present national professions.

Nationally we are guilty of a good deal of discreditable conduct on similar lines. We profess one thing, and we do another.

Our politicians tell us that they rely upon the voice of the people, yet often they employ the political machine which they control, for the express purpose of evading it. A few years ago a Liberal statesman was appointed to Cabinet-rank, and had in consequence to go to his constituency for re-election. He belonged to the party which makes a particular boast of its trust in the popular verdict. But in order to make his election more safe--before his appointment became public property--he communicated to his party agent his ministerial knowledge of the coming event so that the date of the bye-election could be calculated. And the agent proceeded to book up all the public halls in the constituency over the period indicated. Then, in order that the scandal might not become too flagrant he generously released a proportion of his bookings to his Conservative opponent, but refused to release any at all to his Labour opponent; and on those nicely arranged conditions he fought his election--and got beaten.

Now that was surely discreditable conduct, for here was a statesman who, while ostensibly appealing to the voice of the people was doing his level best behind the scenes to deny to it a full and a free opportunity of expression. Yet the whole political world was in so discreditable a condition that there were actually people who thought then--and perhaps still think to-day--that that budding politician was unfairly and hardly treated when he was thereafter pursued from constituency to constituency by his cheated opponent, and successfully prevented from re-entering Parliament even to this day. Probably in other branches of life he was an upright and honourable man, but politics had affected him, as religion or social ambition has affected others, and made him a discreditable witness to the faith which he professed.

Now when you have great organisations and great institutions thus discrediting themselves by conniving at the double-dealings of those whom they would place or keep in authority--you cannot expect the honestly critical observer to continue to place their judgment above his own, or to believe (when some difficult moral problem presents itself) that there is safety for his own soul in relying upon their solution of it.

The sanction of the popular verdict in a community which is true to its professions is very great and should not lightly be set aside. But the sanction of a community or of an organisation which is false to its professions is nil. And it is in the face of such conditions (to which Society and religion always tend to revert so long as their claim is to hold power on any basis of inequality or privilege) that the individual conscience is bound to assert itself and become a resistant irrespective of the weight of numbers against it. And so, in any State where it can be said with truth that the average ethical standard for individual conduct is better than the legal standard, the duty of individual resistance to evil law begins to arise. “Bad laws,” said a wise magistrate, “have to be broken before they can be mended.” And to be broken with good effect they must be broken not by the criminal classes but by the martyrs and the reformers. It is not without significance that every great moral change in history has been brought about by lawbreakers and by resistance to authority.

When the English Nonconformists of two or three centuries ago were fighting governments and breaking laws, they were doing so in defence of a determination to hold doctrines often of a ridiculous kind and productive of a very narrow and bigoted form of religious teaching--a form which, had it obtained the upper hand and secured a general allegiance, might have done the State harm and not good. But, however egregious and even pernicious their doctrine, the justice (and even the value) of the principle for which they contended was not affected thereby. The life of the spirit must take its chance in contact with the life material, and Society must have faith that all true and vital principles will (given a free field and no favour) hold their own against whatever opponents. That is the true faith to which Society is called to-day--but which it certainly does not follow--especially not in war time.

We talk a great deal about liberty, democratic principle, and government by majority; but if those ideals have any real meaning, they mean that--given free trade in ideas and in propaganda on all ethical and moral questions--you have got to trust your community to choose what it thinks good. And to refuse to the general community the means of deciding for itself by the utmost freedom of discussion, is--in a State based on these principles--the most discreditable conduct imaginable.

But of what worth, you may ask, is this moral sanction of a majority? I am not myself greatly enamoured of majority rule in the sense of a majority exercising compulsion on a minority. Compulsion by a majority I should often think it a duty to resist. But to the testimony of a majority that refrained from compulsion I should attach the greatest possible weight. There you would get a public opinion which by its own self-restraint and scrupulous moderation of conduct would be of the highest moral value. For Society fearlessly to admit the full and open advocacy of that which it disapproves is the finest proof I can imagine of its moral stability, and of its faith in the social principles it lives by.

Broadly speaking--with the exception I have already referred to--that view is now admitted in matters of religion; you may hold and you may advocate what religious principles you like. But you are not so free to hold and advocate social and ethical principles. The veto of Society has shifted, and you are far less likely to incur opprobrium and ostracism to-day if you advocate polytheism than if you advocate polygamy or pacifism. And the reason for this, I take to be, that the religion of modern Society is no longer doctrinal but ethical; and so our tendency is to inhibit new ethical teaching though we would not for a moment countenance the inhibition of new doctrinal teaching.

That is our temptation, and I think that in the coming decade there will be a great fight about it; we are not so prepared as we ought to be to allow a free criticism of those social institutions on which our ideas of moral conduct are based, even when they cover (as at present constituted) a vast amount of double-dealing.

Take for instance this Western civilization of ours which bases its social institutions of marriage, property, and inheritance on the monogamic principle, but persists in moral judgments and practices whose only possible justification is to be found in the rather divergent theory that the male is naturally polygamous and the female monogamous.