Most attempted explanations fall into the quite natural error of ascribing the indifference towards the enterprise of the Churches of the English city populations to those particular elements of their teaching or action which they regard as pernicious. In examination of these mysterious multitudes which have collected in the new towns it is always possible to find anything that one desires—drunkenness and temperance, happiness and misery, aspiration and indifference, cowardice and courage. This is specially true when the observer seeks to penetrate beneath the surface and to examine the actual spiritual beliefs and apprehensions accepted by large masses of men whose thoughts on such subjects are never clearly expressed. A few years ago a number of the religious leaders of this country collected in a symposium their explanation of this change.[28] And the replies are very characteristic in their reference of causes to things which are disliked or denied. Dr. Horton, from his study at Hampstead, opines that drink is the chief cause of the indifference to Christianity of the working classes. He would add also absence of good preaching. He judges from the crowds which come to hear the good preacher, that preachers of similar power would draw similar crowds beneath every pulpit. But it is just as possible, and perhaps more demonstrable by experience, that the good preacher only attracts the preacher-loving class from the bad preachers, without substantially recruiting the class from the indifferent outside. The water is decanted from bottle to bottle without increasing its bulk. And drink certainly does not separate from religion the Scotch or Irish in their own land, or the Irish in the great cities of England and America. Nor is there any particular reason why drunkenness should exercise a more general estrangement than the other, more respectable of the deadly sins. Mr. Silas Hocking, again, dislikes war and sacerdotalism. He therefore announces that the Church’s alliance with war and sacerdotalism are the cause of the modern falling away from religion. But the Church and war have lived in some condition of mutual tolerance for nineteen centuries. And as in his vision Christianity practically ceased to exist, “since in the early centuries it became corrupted by paganism,” we may assume that here also some friendly agreement had been possible beforetime, which might not be impossible to-day.
Many social reformers very frequently ascribe the abandonment of the churches by the working classes to the fact that the Church has been the Church of a class, filled with respectabilities and caste distinctions, and hostile to the newer movements for the collective welfare of labour. Such reformers, that is to say, eagerly desire that the Church should abandon the stiff and formal ways of its class traditions, should become more friendly and universal in its appeal, and should concern itself actively and intelligently with the problems of poverty and social discontent. But it would seem impossible to assume that such a transformation of organised Christianity would bring back the people to the spiritual affirmation of their fathers. Letters frequently appear in the newspapers, alike pathetic and passionate, from those who have been sweated by “Christian” employers, or have been offended by hearing clergymen openly supporting “wars of aggression” or opposing the franchise and free libraries. But there is no evidence—because in the nature of things such evidence cannot be forthcoming—to prove that the correspondents or the crowd represented by them would be accepting the enormous affirmations of Theism or of Christianity if all these things were suddenly changed.
Again, many good men have perhaps too fatuously discovered and proclaimed that there is “no hostility to Christ” amongst the working men. One observer in the symposium above quoted can find satisfaction in the fact that a crowd of men flung up their caps and cheered His name on Tower Hill. “Such straws show which way the wind blows.” Such “straws” show nothing more than any noise and excitement have shown since the day of the riding into Jerusalem, or the scene in the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Why should any one to-day be “hostile to Christ”? And what relationship has such vague toleration or applause to anything in the nature of a vital and compelling faith? All such sentiment belongs to the same class as that of the comfortable householder, leading a life of respectable and benignant self-indulgence, who will inform you in a burst of confidence that his religion is that of the “Sermon on the Mount,” or one “of willingness to do good.” There is no more common illusion than the interpretation of ethical judgment as spiritual affirmation. To all such advocates of an inexacting standard Christianity appears as a rule of common life, which has been somehow evaded or destroyed. But Christianity is something widely different from a rule of common life. It is a creed, not a system of morals. Religion is an attempt at some ultimate assertion concerning the being and purpose of the world. No tolerance of the virtues specifically Christian or admiration of a life lost in the distant centuries can guarantee that creed’s validity, or restore a faith which appears to be slipping over the visible horizon of mankind.
There is morality without faith; kindliness and devotion with no “consciousness of a divine inheritance or of the sin by which it is lost.” Such is the testimony of Canon Barrett, from thirty years’ experience of every class in English society. The people of East London especially are better mannered, better dressed, more respectable, more sober than the people of a previous generation. But they have “less idealism,” “less superstition.” “Joy” is in consequence lacking. Life is more respectable, less vivid. The salt of life is somehow losing its savour. Whatever scale of value is represented by the outlook upon larger spiritual kingdoms is vanishing. And the scale is in consequence contracting, truncated. “The desertion of the churches and the somewhat undignified efforts of the churches to attract congregations are equally the outward signs of spiritual failing.”
Here is the kernel of the whole matter. Ethical advance is accompanied (as it seems) by spiritual decline. It was the process which so perplexed Mr. Gladstone more than half a century ago. Growth of morality is coincident with decline in religion. Violent controversialists still endeavour to demonstrate the opposite, exhibiting murders, thefts, and adulteries accompanying the introduction of secular education or the disestablishment of a Church. On a large survey the facts do not bear such an interpretation. The work of civilisation steadily advances. The vision of a universe beyond or behind the material steadily fades.
My effort here is confined to diagnosis, not prophecy. And prophecy concerning religion is of all forecasts the most impossible. For never is it safe to assume that any piece of solid ground may not suddenly flare and tremble, or any common bush commence to burn with fire. Remembering the historic failures in similar ages of rationalism, the contemptuous dismissal by Tacitus, in a kind of footnote, of the faith which was to transform the world, he would be rash who asserted that even to-day and in this secure civilisation there may not be the seed growing which will survive when this very society shall have vanished from the earth. My own belief is that the so-called intellectual difficulties of belief are to-day less operative amongst the masses of mankind than certain other changes which are powerful in modern life. I should put in the forefront of these the creation of the towns, with their machinery and their confusion; the condition of labour within their boundaries; and the establishment of security and order in the present “Roman Peace” which has come upon the western races of Europe. The result, as Dolling saw it amongst his people in East London, is a life universally dull, decorous, decent. Nor can we estimate what developments may originate from such a condition of uniform comfort and acquiescence. General Booth in his Salvation Army, the most remarkable spiritual product of the present age, has shown how the inspiration may come in a sudden flaming up of the incalculable elements of the soul of man, amongst seemingly drab and unimportant people; with a craving for self-immolation, and the intrusion into commonplace accepted ways of the vision of blood and fire. The fruit and duration of such a state are equally difficult to foresee. Sidgwick concluded at the end of his days that “humanity would never acquiesce in a godless world.” “If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,” was Carlyle’s fierce comment, “all or most of them, there will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for several centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.” The first experiment on a large scale of society organised on a positive basis came to a premature end: through the intrusion of Christianity and the advent of the barbarian. The second seems about to be established. It should prove an interesting study to any observer possessing the felicity of seeing alike its commencement and its close. But it is not impossible that the same two disturbing elements—the advent of the barbarian, intrusion of Christianity—may once again prevent the realisation, upon adequate scale and through any substantial period, of life seeking comfort in a rational society.
CHAPTER X
THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY
SUCH—in briefest outline—is the England which confronts the challenge of a new century. It represents a civilisation containing many of the elements of human welfare, and enjoying a widespread happiness and personal comfort. Such comfort appears as somewhat unjustly divided between class and class. A main body of adequately rewarded and generally satisfied workers are set between the unnaturally wealthy on the one side, on the other the unnaturally poor. The superficial appearance is of a “plutocracy” with riches extravagantly accumulated and extravagantly expended; a middle class industrious and a little bewildered; a labouring population industrious, and in times of prosperity contented; below, a life which cries almost unheeded from a condition of perpetual privation. In all cases prosperity has brought some especial dangers: a weakening of the willingness to work, a rejection of earlier simplicities, a too eager absorption in pleasure. Representatives of the rich, from the security and ignorance of the country house and the country-house outlook upon society, bring charges against the working man: of loafing and neglecting his labour; of betting, drinking, and idling; of organising trades unions as a tyranny on the “ca’ canny” principle, designed to restrain the honest toiler from giving a fair day’s labour for a fair wage. Representatives of the working people, on the other hand, inflamed to bitterness by the wretchedness and degradation of those who endure an animal life in the abyss, bring a fierce indictment against the wealthy: of luxurious living, of callous indifference to the wrongs they see around them, of the contented plundering of the poor. The fact is that each class, in its several station, has pretty much the same characteristics, impulses, desires. If the poor were suddenly made rich, in a short space of time the majority would find themselves able to enjoy superfluous dinners, artificially created pleasures, and the satisfaction of an abundant life, without any sharp sense of judgment and condemnation in the knowledge of the huge misery that accompanies all this waste. If the rich were suddenly made poor they would soon be forcing their children to leave school prematurely in order to earn wages at mean occupations, would be organising themselves into “tyrannous” trades unions, would be mitigating the monotony of their lives by the excitement of a shilling on a horse or the encouragement of alcoholic stimulation. Dives and Lazarus may some day experience that kaleidoscopic change which has been dear to the heart of the discontented in all ages: a reversal of the accepted social order in a poor man’s Paradise. A very short time afterwards the child of Lazarus would be found faring sumptuously every day; indifferent to the descendant of Dives, lying at his gate, impotent, full of sores.
The observer will therefore not be greatly affected, in his choice of advocacy and action, by the particular arguments and appeals which may be advanced for the one side or the other. He sees a literature which vindicates an unequal distribution of wealth, in the necessity for leisure and a secured comfort for a certain proportion of the people, if there is to survive an amenity of manners, a cultivation of the arts, the traditions of a governing class. He sees a literature which stretches gaunt fingers over the costly clothes and furniture, and exhibits upon them the stains of blood. No reasoned or intellectual appeal will compel him to accept the one side or the other, to appear as the advocate of order or the advocate of change. Instinct, sentiment, temperament, upbringing in the case of the many; in the case of the few, a deliberate effort of the will, without much intellectual justification, and certainly as no nicely balanced adjustment of alternative, will direct statesmen or publicist to-day to choose the side of the rich or the side of the poor.