[24] The parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "Please do not teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness.
CHAPTER VI
SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
In Utopia the transition from education to salvation, both in theory and practice, is obvious and direct. The difference between education and salvation is, indeed, purely nominal: in their essence the two processes are one. As the education given in Utopia is, in the main, self-education, there is no reason why it should not be continued indefinitely after the child has left school; and as its function is to foster the growth of the child's many-sided nature (with its vast potentialities), there is every reason why it should be continued as long as he lives. In other words, the path of salvation is the path of self-realisation, the most important part of which is traversed in childhood; and to attain to salvation (which is in a sense unattainable) is to remain faithful to that path till it passes beyond our thought.
Outside Utopia there is a widely different conception of the meaning and purpose of education, and a correspondingly different conception of the nature of salvation and the means by which it is to be achieved. The idea of salvation, with the complementary idea of perdition, may be regarded as the crown and completion of that scheme of external rewards and punishments which plays so prominent a part in Western education. Salvation, which is the highest of all external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness to be won and enjoyed. It follows that the relation between education and salvation is, in the main, one of analogy, rather than of identity (as in Utopia), or even of vital connection. Or shall we say that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation as the first rehearsal of the play?
There are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the West, just as there are two worlds to be lived in,—the Supernatural world and the world of Nature.
In what are called religious circles, to be saved is to have gained admission to Heaven, and, in doing so, to have escaped the torment and misery of Hell. There was a time when Hell was taken very seriously; but the idea of never-ending torment and misery is found, when steadily faced, to be so intolerable that popular thought, even in religious circles, is now turning away from it; and so loosely do men sit, in these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming interchangeable terms. But if all men are to be admitted to Heaven (or to its ante-room, Purgatory) at the end of this, their one earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection between conduct and salvation. For though there may be degrees of happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss of difference which yawns between Heaven and Hell; and the practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men—the self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and compassionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent—are to reap the same reward. If a man is a notoriously evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in consigning him to Hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put up its shutters. But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all the rest of Mankind; and the maxim, "Live anyhow, and you will be saved somehow," seems to sum up with tolerable accuracy the popular attitude towards the twofold problem of duty and destiny.
I do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is formally countenanced by the Churches and Sects. They would doubtless repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their own teaching is largely responsible for it. For not only is the idea of natural retribution wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism, but also, in the two great schools of Western theology, there is, and always has been, a strong tendency to undervalue conduct (in the broad, human sense of the word), and to make the means of salvation mechanical rather than vital. At any rate the sacramental teaching of the Catholic Church, and the Calvinistic doctrine of salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ, readily lend themselves to such an interpretation.
So ineffective is the current eschatology, in its bearing on conduct, that the latent energy of Man's nature—his latent desire to have a central purpose in life—is compelling him to work out for himself another and a more mundane conception of salvation, to set before himself as the end of life the winning of certain temporal prizes, and to keep this end steadily in view from day to day and from year to year. Such a conception of salvation has always had a strong attraction for him, though in his more orthodox days he found it desirable to subordinate it to, or if possible harmonise it with, the conception which his religion dictated to him; and of late its attractiveness has been increased by the fact that he is beginning to throw his eschatology (even in its present emasculated form) to the winds.