Every philosopher is a humorist who has been squeezed. And the newspaper man, odd as this may sound, is not the least appropriate student to pursue the wingy mysteries in divinity. For he is kinspirit of the parson in this, that church and press are perhaps the two professions that have most frankly regarded themselves as separate estates, above and apart from the common man. The priest esteems himself the vicar of God. The pressman appoints himself vicar of News. The priest transmits to the congregation as much of God’s doings as he thinks will be not too embarrassing for them to hear. And the newspaper man lays bare that portion of the event which he considers the public will be most anxious to pay for. Both are anthologists.
For some time I had been saving clippings of newspaper stories about recent religious controversy. I meant to sit down some evening and read them through, patiently, to see how much humane sense I could winnow. But I found I could not force my eyes through them. For the sake of record, to notify the quaintness of mankind, I copied down a few of the headlines. “Christ Held Divine or Illegitimate: Dr. Pettingill Makes Baptists Gasp by Strong Defense of Virgin Birth.” (New York World.) Dr. Guthrie Finds Yule All Pagan: St. Mark’s Rector Says Gift Custom Was Roman, Mistletoe Celtic and Tree Teutonic. (New York Times.) Modernism Found Here Mid Rituals, Dogma Mid Glare. (New York Evening Post.) Dr. Guthrie Scents Clashes to Come. (New York Times.) And so on. I threw the mass of clippings into the fire.
And yet throughout those naïve burblings the reader felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and disgust. For the newspapers, with their unerring instinct, realize that men are keenly and desperately interested in these matters. Hidden inside that mysterious carcass, your neighbour, is the universal cry, “I want to be happy!” And with all their agile and cautious skill at hiding what they really think, men wildly crave those liberating sorceries (liquor and love and laughter, perhaps even literature, too) that roll away the stone from the door of the heart.
Yet perhaps no man in his senses talks about religion except for the pleasure of the talk, which is a sufficient human excuse. For the less we talk about religion, probably, the nearer we come to the heart of it. By religion we mean, I suppose, our ligatures with an unseen world—a world not realized, as Wordsworth says in those “Intimations” that are a whole prayer-book in themselves. There are “high instincts,” he tells us, before which we tremble “like a guilty thing surprised.” Our guilt, surely, is that we know ourselves to have been so wearily and perversely disloyal to that unseen world of beauty and ecstasy; and our surprise, that when we escape into the honest solitudes of the mind we find it waiting for us. There is a great saying to the effect that wherever two or three are gathered together, I shall be among you. But, alas! it is even more true perhaps (one must not forget a plenty of perhapses) that wherever two or three are gathered together, there I am not. Human meeting introduces awkwardly human difficulties and embarrassments. It introduces, for instance, vanity and humility, both awkward encumbrances to truth. Is there a man who does not know, sorrowfully, that he is much “better company” when he is alone? As old Doctor Donne found in the absence of his mistress, there is a “close corner of the brain” where the purest and loveliest embraces are possible. Of all mistresses, the fairest and the farthest away is Truth. God is known, if at all, in solitude.
§3
The theological bickerings of our time and their “tincture of choler,” as Hobbes would say, are due perhaps to the uneven progress of a great shift in the human notion of God. The primitive imagination of Deity is often of a gigantic omnipotent and omnipresent personality. Then, later, men come to think of God as a kind of force or law, or a harmony among infinite laws and forces. This process of magnifying God from a person to a “far-off Divine Event” proceeds unevenly, as do all ideas. And there is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea to-morrow. More important than the novelty of ideas is the differential in the rate at which people accept them. Or it might even be put the other way round—the rate at which ideas accept people as vehicles. An idea often hops into a person and uses him, more or less as we hop into taxicabs. Bernard Shaw remarked, not unwisely, that his “Irrational Knot” was a first try (on the part of “the Life Force”) to get the theme of “A Doll’s House” written in English.
Robinson Crusoe’s religion was merely a calculus of personal benefit. When he found that the seeds he threw away had sprouted and come up, he suddenly remembered the goodness of God. But gradually men tend to rise sufficiently above their own pangs and pleasures to relish the conception of a vaster God—a God who does not even know that we exist. There are still, astounding as it seems, actual and living parsons who tell us that the Museum of Natural History is an affront to the Deity. Their simplicity is as delightful as that of Edmund Gosse’s father (if you remember that great book, “Father and Son”). The rock that his reason split upon was the problem whether Adam and Eve, created de novo, had navels. There are others who find in the spider webs and redwood rings of the museum a powerful impulse to wonder and praise. At any rate, this process of magnifying God from an invisible bishop of friable temper to a universal phantom of legality is what Thomas Hardy had in mind when he urged “the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the Fundamental Energy.” Nor, on consideration, do we find the masculine pronoun a symbol of such benevolent majesty that it need much longer be retained as spokesman for Deity. It is necessary for man to know, as astronomers do, the inconceivable minuteness of himself and his affairs.
Yet, knowing his unimportance, it is equally urgent for man to act as though his business were momentous. For the whole intellectual life is based upon paradox and dainty artifice. And here we encounter some fundamental characteristics of human behaviour which are highly interesting.
First of all, man is orderly. Finding himself in a grotesquely complicated universe, he hastily tries to reduce what he sees to some general principles. He concocts helpful formulæ, rules of thumb, mnemonic rhymes, all sorts of proverbs, to simplify matters. There has been a rather absurd eagerness on the part of the newspapers to reproach the church for its adherence to formalism. But man is a formula-bearing animal. And I doubt if the most rigid bishop who ever lived was more at the mercy of ritual and formulated ways of expression than the average city editor. An incident may be as interesting as you please, but unless it fits into his carefully ratiocinated scheme of what constitutes a “story” and how it should be “played,” it gets little attention. I have mentioned the Museum of Natural History; let’s take it again as an illustration. I took there a small girl four years old. At first she was appalled and horrified by the things she saw. Live animals, at the zoo, she was familiar with. But these so genuine-looking and yet motionless creatures, plausible enough in their synthetic facsimile surroundings, yet with a gruesome air of not-quite-rightness—she was badly puzzled. They fitted into no preconceived frame in her small mind.
“Are they real, Daddy?” she inquired.