This Socialistic movement, then, took its rise not from within the People but from without, and not in connection with Religion, the great ally of the powers that were, the Middle-class, but on the whole antagonistic to it. This movement took its rise in men of intellect who had little or no care for Religion, and its tendency is intellectual and careless of Religion. The Middle-class has shown nothing but dislike to this movement: the Middle-class has understood enough of the ideas of this movement to know that they are subversive of its own superiority. As for the People, they have understood little or nothing. Socialists tell them, what is indeed the truth, that they are the masters: that to-morrow, if they pleased, they could send a parliament up to Westminster that should dictate what terms they pleased to “their lords and masters, the landowners and the capitalists.” The People does not happily believe it. They are so hopeless: they have been deceived so often by those who said they would help them. (Bill here, you see, with a wife and six children, all living in a den that the Zoological people would consider unfit for a hyena—Bill cannot be made to understand how the question comes home to him!) Besides which, let us say it at once and insist upon it, the People is the most long-suffering of all things: it desires to despoil no man, it only desires the happiness which mere food, clothing, and a house will give it.
In this state of affairs—the powerlessness of the Socialists to bring home to the People the great idea of social improvement—lie the causes of the religious movement whose best-known and best representative is the Salvation Army.
III.
Consider it—first generally and then particularly.
In Russia the People has religion and no freedom. In England the People has freedom and no religion. (In both, let us add, the People has misery unspeakable). The one question presses for solution in the one country, the other in the other. The two most piteous spectacles in Europe are the religious People of Russia, and the free People of England. The Aristocracy which governs the one, the Middle-class which governs the other, both are equally indifferent to the People. Add to the fact of the utter want of religion of the English People (it is understood that by People I mean the masses), the fact of their utter want of, I will not say the comforts, but the necessities of life, and you have a field for revolution such as nowhere else, I believe, presents itself save in Russia herself.—I speak in the present, as if the problem presented itself to me to-day just as it did years ago, and I am delighted to notice that at last the English Middle-class is awakening to the fact of the misery of the People, and also of the danger of letting that misery continue. But it is quite a mistake to suppose that either the one or the other is mitigated, not to say ended, or that it will be so for years to come.
Religion in England—and Religion has, inaptly enough, become a synonym for Christianity, in which general sense of the term I use it here—Religion in England, just like everything else, is conducted in the interest of the Middle-class. Go into the London back-streets on a sunday morning. You will find the men leaning against the walls, the women at the doors, the children in the gutters. The public-houses, you observe, are closed: the Middle-class does not like that the People should be drinking beer and spirits while they themselves are indulging in religious worship. Enter the church or the chapel. What are the services like? We all know them—a performance on the part of the choir, or a discreet, sibilant, half-articulate murmur on the part of the congregation. The clergyman or minister reads out a portion of the wonderful and beautiful history of Jesus in a fine meaningless monotone, and “here endeth the second lesson.” But of the passion and the peace of the Galilean story, what does he know? He has forgotten or never known Jesus, but he can tell you plenty about Christ. Listen to the sermons. What do they treat of? Matters that are likely to interest the men and women outside there? The sermons are empty of Jesus and full of Christ—empty of the truth of the Master and full of the dogmas of the Pupils. Theology, theological dogmas, Catholic or Protestant, are perhaps interesting to men and women who are well to do, and like to have something to argue about; but what does poverty care for them? The man who has eaten a good breakfast and is waiting for a good dinner may care to have it shown to him, that he and his fellows are the one body of Christians that is absolutely and entirely orthodox; but the man with an empty belly, and little or no prospect of filling it, may perhaps be forgiven for not caring a jot whether these are blasts of true or false doctrine, or not. The matter does not affect him: he stops outside. So should we.
Now, I would not for a moment imply that there are not priests, clergymen, and ministers who have done, and are doing, fine and noble work among the People. There are many such. But what I do say is, that, speaking generally, the church and the chapel have both utterly failed to seriously affect the mass of the People, and that they have done so for the reasons I have given above.—“In the year 1865,” says Mr. Booth in one of the Salvation Army pamphlets, “Mr. Booth was led, by the Providence of God, by no plan or idea of his own, to the East of London, where the appalling fact that the enormous bulk of the population were totally ignorant and deficient of real religion, and altogether uninfluenced by the existing religious organizations, so impressed him that he determined to devote his life to making these people hear and know God, and thus save them from the abyss of misery in which they were plunged, and rescue them from the damnation that was before them. The Salvation Army is the result.” The Salvation Army is the result. He simply states the fact. It was “by no plan or idea of his own.” He has, so far as I know, never explained more than the phenomena of it.[6] I have talked with one of his sons on the subject, and all he has to tell me in explanation of 859 corps or stations, 2041 paid officials, and War Cry newspapers with a weekly circulation of 550,000, is how, as he takes it, the Salvationists “get at” the People; but he knows, and probably cares, absolutely nothing about the why. “The grate was set,” I say, “You were the match, and behold the fire!” “It is the Lord,” he says, and I do not think of contradicting him. It is not natural that a man who takes part in a movement should know more than the how of it, should know the why. If he did, he would not be as unhesitating as he is in his belief that his movement is so good. To achieve little we must aim at much. He who lives passionately in the present must leave the dead to bury their dead and the babes unborn to consider their suckling: he must create, he has not time to criticise. At the same time how important it is that there should be not only doers but watchers; not only creators but critics; not only those who concern themselves with the how but also those who concern themselves with the why, for the why unlocks the gates of both the past and the future: it tells us not only the whence but also the whither.
Now, as I have said, in a certain state of affairs which we have noticed lies this why, and there, if we can only look well enough, we shall find it. The Salvation Army is, like everything else an organism. It has its seed, and all its stages of development up to its maturity and down into its decay, when it, too, like everything else, will go to form nutriment for other organisms, just as others have for its own.
Now, nothing will help us more in our search after this why than a knowledge of the how, and, since this knowledge is, at any rate among the governing classes, wonderfully limited, I propose giving a short account of how the Salvation Army and its work has struck me personally. It seems almost needless to state that I am an unprejudiced observer. The Salvation Army, as the Salvation Army, is literally nothing to me: my only interest in it lies in the influence which it exerts, whether for good or evil, on the People. I have no cause to plead. If anyone can point out mistakes of mine, or even demonstrate to me that my whole view of this matter is an illusion, no one, I am sure, will be more pleased and grateful than myself. Those are our real benefactors who demonstrate to us an illusion and open the way to a better view of things.