Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

There are at least some of us who stand together. Our wills are set against having any more people die on crosses in this world than can be helped. If there is any kind of skill, craftmanship, technique, psychology, knowledge of human nature which can be brought to bear, which will keep the best people in this world not only from being, but from belonging on crosses in it, we propose to bring these things to bear. We are not willing to believe that crowds are not inclined to Goodness. We are not willing to slump down on any general slovenly assumption about the world that goodness cannot be made to work in it.

If goodness is not efficient in this world we will make it efficient.

Our reason for saying this is that we honestly glory in this world. We believe that at this moment while we are still on it, it is in the act of being a great world, that it is God's world, and in God's Name we will defend its reputation.

We do not deny that it may be better spiritual etiquette, more heroic looking and may have a certain moral grace, so far as a man himself is concerned, if the world makes him suffer for being honest. But after all he is only one man, and whether he dislikes his suffering or likes it and feels fine and spiritual over it, it is only one man's suffering.

But why is it that when the world makes a man suffer, everybody should seem always to be thinking of the man? Why does not anybody think of the world?

Is not the fact that a whole world, eternal and innumerable, is supposed to be such a mean, dishonest sort of a world that it will make a man suffer for being good a more important fact than the man's suffering is? It seems to me to be taking not lower but higher ground when one insists on believing in the race one belongs to and in believing that it is a human race that can be believed in. After two thousand years of Christ, it is a lazy, tired, anæmic slander on the world to believe that it does not pay to be good in it. The man who believes it, and acts as if he believed it, is to-day and has been from the beginning of time the supreme enemy of us all. He is guilty before heaven and before us all and in all nations of high treason to the human race. One of the next most important things to do in modern religion is going to be to get all these morally dressed-up, noble-looking people who enjoy feeling how good they are because they have failed, to examine their hearts, stop enjoying themselves and think.

For hundreds of years we have religiously run after martyrs and we have learned in a way, most of us, to have a kind of cooped-up patriotism for our own nation, but why are there not more people who are patriotic toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them—in doing something that would make it stop. There was a poet and soldier some thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into his imprecatory psalms), than has been put, I believe, into all the sweet whinings and the spiritual droopings of the world in three thousand years. I do not deny that I would quarrel, as a matter of form, with the lack of urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory Psalms; but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire, with the necessity in the man's heart that was poured into them, I have the profoundest sympathy.

David had a manly, downright belief. His belief was that if sin is allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault. David felt that it was partly his—and being a king—very much his, and as he was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to help.

What he really meant—what lay in the background of his petition—the real spirit that made him speak out in that naïve bold way before the Lord, and before everybody—that made him ask the great God in heaven all looking so white and so indifferent, to come right down please and jump on the necks of the wicked, was a vivid, live vision of his own for his own use that he was going to make the world more decent. He was spirited about it. If God did not, He would, and naturally when he came to expressing how he felt in prayer, he wanted God to stand by him. To put it in good plain soldier-like Hebrew, He wanted God to jump on the necks of his enemies.

Speaking strictly for ourselves, in our more modern spirit of course, we would want to modulate this, we admit that we would not ask God to do a little thing like jumping on the necks of the wicked—just for us—nor would we care to break away from the other things we are doing and attend to it ourselves, nor would we even favour their necks being jumped on by others, but while we do not agree with David's particular request, we do profoundly agree with the way he felt when he made it. We would not make our flank movement on the wicked in quite the same way and according to our more modern and more scientific manner of thought, we would want to do something more practical with the wicked, but we would want to do something with them and we would want to do it now.