Passing back once more from personal religion, or the rise and purification of the inner nature of the individual man, to the great subject of religion in general, we must again have recourse to physical analogies or figures of speech. A mighty stream or current of spiritual vibrations has flowed from the beginning behind the circumstances of history; and each branch of the human family has caught up, retained, and manifested a portion thereof. But the manifestations have at all times been governed by the receptive capacity of the particular race and its inherent distinctions. Every formulated religion is of dual complexion: first, the initial motive, which is spiritual; second, the expression, which is due to ideas, and these are furnished by the mind. The creeds, dogmas, rituals, are outgrowths of the age, civilization and locality.
Christianity has ostensibly been the religion of Western Europe during a long period of development in all the material appliances of a civilized life when mental and physical forces, engaged in accumulating wealth, have dominated this development and tended to depress and destroy the higher impulses and aspirations of man. Christianity, already weakened by errors that had crept in, was unable to withstand the corrupting influences of a money-making age. It adapted itself to the sternly practical business-like son of the West, and dropped out much of the imaginative and reflective side of its teaching. But the “old order changeth,” and, as has been shown in previous chapters, one great department of civilized life, viz. the prevailing system of industry, is hastening to its dissolution. That system has been tried in the furnace of a longsuffering, patient experience, and found to create national wealth in abundance, while utterly failing to subserve general well-being, and bring about a just arrangement of social conditions.
Through all the channels of the nation’s best thinking there has sounded low, but clear as a clarion note, a call to social reform, and now, in the depths of industrial confusion, amid dumb despair and loud-voiced public discontent, the still small voice of conscience speaks audibly, and a stirring of dry bones over the whole field of action, betokens the awakening to a new era of existence. Spiritual vibrations have loosened the foundations of our materialized, selfish life, and pierced through the crust of callous indifference to the heart of the nation. A new tenderness lurks there. It prompts to the entire overthrow of our hideous industrial warfare and the substitution of a well-ordered system based, reared and maintained through the action of wide-reaching love. But love was the distinguishing feature of early Christianity, and the genius of its teaching. Through the figure of family life, with its tender ties, unselfish actions and unity of interests and feeling, did Christianity strive to allure to the broader, higher, deeper love that embraces all mankind and manifests throughout all human relations.
Pioneers of the social revolution may abjure the churches, creeds and rituals, and boast themselves agnostic, but none the less are they aiding the reembodiment, on this material plane, of the true religious spirit, or the birth of a religion fitted for the nation’s age and civilization.[[18]]
[18]. Mr. Lester F. Ward (in his new work published in 1903) formulates a distinction between human and animal societies by saying that the environment transforms the animal while man transforms the environment. This transformation constitutes what he calls “achievement,” and is the characteristic feature in human progress. The products of “achievement” are not material things. They are methods, ways, principles, devices, arts, systems, institutions.
The Church, it is true, gives no formal countenance to the industrial revolution, but that does not disprove my contention that it is the distinctive religious movement of this age, and that it is in line and harmony with the religious movements of former ages. These may seem to have been less secular than this, but they always embraced a reformation of social and individual life. The actual distinction arises from the Church’s own deficiencies, and from the greater elaboration of modern society, causing an almost undue prominence to be given to the outward changes necessary at the beginning of a modern reformation. The Church must inevitably conform itself to the industrial revolution. It must reform itself from within; and this is clearly perceived by many of its members.
Whilst I write a conference of the Young Men’s Christian Association is taking place. A question discussed was: “What is the cause of young men’s drifting away from the Church?” One speaker remarked that to his mind the cause was the want of fixity of opinion on the great fundamentals of their common Christianity. Young men found that ministers were not agreed upon what they preached, and until the Church made up its mind as to what was really the truth, there could be no remedy for this drifting. Another speaker said he knew young men who hated the Church, and said it was not consistent. They pointed to the slum dwellings in their great cities, and asked what the Church was doing to remedy the state of affairs there disclosed. In fact, they said: “Salvation is hardly worth the taking, it’s so mixed up with money-making. If the Church was to reach young men, it must take up a more consistent attitude with regard to all social questions.” (From the Scotsman.)
But religion is not of the Church alone, religion appertains to the totality of life; and the right ordering of all the conditions of the nation’s material existence is the first step in the attainment of a national religious life. For, observe, the broad current of spiritual vibrations encompassing the race can have no free course and ingress to thrill the nerves and quicken the pulse of the nation so long as there endures a fierce, brutal struggle for the means of potential life—a struggle that hardens the heart and coarsens the fibre of rich and poor alike. The movement we call Economic Socialism is a veritable recurrence of the cry of the Prophet Esaias: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.”[[19]]
[19]. What profits it to the human Prometheus that he has stolen the fire of heaven to be his servant, and that the spirits of the earth and of the air obey him, if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals and keep him on the brink of destruction?—Huxley.
The Church militant must adjust itself without and within to the social industrial revolution, to a wider development than hitherto in man’s reasoning powers, and to a profound impulse in man—an impulse born of experience—that is carrying him towards the vast region of philosophic mysticism which lies behind the common Christian creeds and doctrines. The poet caught the shadow of coming events when he wrote—