Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

ON GOING TO CHURCH

ON GOING TO CHURCH

Oct. 28, 19—

My dear Alexa,—

Some commonplace person has said that the really important part of a woman’s letter is always in the postscript. It pains me to recognise how often the commonplace is also the true. It is the postscript of your pleasant letter that I must answer to-day. “Ought I to go to church?” you ask, and I can’t think why you say “ought.” “Ought” is a word which you know irritates me. It suggests Ethical Societies and their preposterous hymns. It raises questions of “right and wrong,” and I feel that at my age one should be done with questions of that disturbing kind. And the worst of it is I don’t quite know what you mean, for you may mean one of two things. It may be a very little question or a very big one you are putting. Well, I will try to deal with both. If you mean ought you to go to church on Sunday just now, when you are staying with correct people who go themselves, then I answer most emphatically “Yes.” To begin with it is a mere act of politeness. You might as well ask “Ought I to dress for dinner?” But it is something more than that. To stay away from church when your host and his friends go is to challenge after-luncheon controversy, to invite a religious polemic. It is to advertise in the most vulgar and objectionable way possible your irreligion, or, if not that exactly, at least your religious doubts. It is to make yourself prominent and prickly.

But I can’t believe you mean that. A child of mine may have prickles, but I am happily confident that she would carefully conceal them. What I think you do mean is, “Is it wise, in order to make the best of life, to cultivate the religious emotions?” That was it, wasn’t it? “Ought I to go to church?” was only your succinct and symbolical way of putting it. It was neatly put, and I congratulate you, Alexa.

Well, it is a big question, as I said, but one that is comparatively easy to answer, for the answer is obvious. It may take a long time answering but that is the worst of the obvious: it always does take such a long time stating, whereas the non-obvious may generally be put into an epigram. Who are the nicest people you know, Alexa; the people you like best to talk to; the people whose judgment you most rely on; the gayest people; the people who have the art of treating serious things lightly and light things with a becoming seriousness; the all round people; the people whose opinion you would most value of a poem, a novel, a symphony, a landscape; the people whose taste you trust? Think now, are they not in almost every case people with some sort of religious belief? Or, to put it otherwise, have you ever met a really delightful Atheist, man or woman? You have met many worthy Atheists, I know, persons whose moral code was as conspicuous as a red nose, whose admirable qualities stuck out of them like hat-pins, persons you are almost bound in common decency to respect; but have they been delightful? Were you not always conscious of a want in them somewhere, just as you are conscious of something lacking in a person who has no ear for music, or who does not like olives?

The religious instinct, the craving to get into touch with something outside the material world, beyond the things we see or apprehend with any of our five senses is born in us just like any other instinct. The history of mankind is proof positive of the fact. We have never yet caught a primitive man—most savages are degenerates they say; but, depend upon it, if ever we do we shall find him going “to church,” as you would put it. Even if we didn’t, even if it could be demonstrated beyond possibility of doubt that our arboreal ancestor knew naught of religious emotion, but was contented with his wives and his cocoanuts, it would be no disproof of my assertion that we, the people of 19—, are born with the religious instinct. There are exceptions of course, freaks, just as there are unfortunates born without drums to their ears and without a liking for the scent of tonkin beans; but we need not bother about them. You, my child, have drums to your ears, you keep a tonkin bean in your glove-box, and you have the religious instinct. The question I am answering, remember, is: ought you, Alexa, to go to church? In other words, then, it amounts to this: ought you to suppress an instinct? It is a question surely which answers itself. The pleasures of life consist in the gratification of instincts, either inherited or cultivated. To suppress an instinct, then, or to allow it to atrophy by disuse, is to shut oneself off from an opportunity of pleasure, to narrow the range of one’s emotions and one’s intellect, to diminish the number of one’s sensations; it is to be incomplete, and if you are incomplete, you cannot be delightful, Alexa. Your favourite Heine says somewhere that a charming woman without religion is like a beautiful flower without perfume. He was always right when he wrote of women. So am I.