Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

This is the worst that an institution can do. The individual is crushed. The primeval reverence for custom seen in the ants has crystallized without getting developed and specialized into its higher form of reverence for the individual ant. He is a type of arrested development.

The natural history of religion is then to be sought in a reverence for custom that gradually specializes itself into a regard for the individual. If these things are true, the advancement of any civilization may be measured by the extent in which the rights of individuals are held sacred. And this is what we have always been taught.

Government was in its origin indistinguishable from religion, and down to the latest day of time, the fluctuating institutions of man will record this kinship between ritual and law.

The scientists, in trying to explain religion and progress as the result of an egoism gradually expanding itself to a regard for mankind, have been pulling at the wrong end of the cocoon. The thread unwound a bit and then broke; unwound again and again broke. They were puzzling themselves over a conception fundamentally unscientific and at war with their own first principles.

The genesis of the emotions proceeds like other developments from the simple towards the complex. The notion that the egoism of man gradually expanded so as to include the whole human race in a love which was in reality a love of himself, assumes that this large love is the sum of lesser loves. It fixes the attention on the objects of human feeling, and not upon the character of the feeling itself. This character is the thing to be studied. When we contrast the religious and social feelings of the civilized man with those of the savage we see the same specialization and complexity in the emotions themselves which is traceable in any higher development. The forms, arguments, theories, customs by which the feeling is expressed, show an ever-increasing refinement of sympathy. We are not approaching a general and vague emotion built up out of lesser regards for particular people. We are approaching a stage of differentiation, of analysis, a stage of the personal application of that same altruism which appears in its lower form as blind worship and self-abasement before some fetich. The utility of this emotion, in whatever stage of its development, is a consideration that may justify it to the philosopher, but which is not the primum mobile in the breast of him that has it. The whole history of man shows that progress comes in the shape of an increasing tender-heartedness which can give no lucid account of itself, because it is an organic process.

The learned classes are apt to approach a problem in its most difficult form. Out of travellers’ tales about man in the South Sea Islands, the sociologist evolves a theory of religion. Take up a book on the natural history of religion and you will find enough learned citations about the Hurons and the Esquimaux and the Thibet tribes to furnish the library of Pantagruel. Now the regard of a savage for his idol is a very obscure question of psychology. Ten years of youth spent among a tribe would not be too long a period in which to lay the foundations for an intelligent guess at the facts, let alone their significance.

Meanwhile, the actual genealogy of our own religious feelings is neglected as too familiar. Yet the spiritual history of that race which gave Europe many of its religions, is better known than any other history of a like antiquity. The point of view and feeling about life which has given us our own experience of religion was developed in the Jew. The Old Testament is the place in which to study the growth and meaning of the only religious feeling that we are sure we understand. The history of the Jews is the history of a single overpowering emotion which appears in its two forms,—so identical in content that you may often find them both in the same sentence, both in the same verse of Isaiah or Psalm of David,—prostration before the Lord of Hosts, compassion for the poor and the oppressed. This passion of altruism which gave the prophets their terrible power is the legacy of the Jew to the world. The emotion of self-abasement and self-sacrifice and the emotion of love towards others, are one thing. This, in its lower forms, leads to self-mutilation and incantations; in its higher forms, it becomes embodied by the prophetic fury of great poets into the idea of a Messiah who shall be both savior and sacrifice. There is only one passion at work in all these great protagonists of human nature, in Nathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and in the innumerable prophets who confronted the arbitrary power of the kings. These men stood for righteousness and showed an intensity of moral courage which nothing but compassion has ever engendered, and nothing but faith has ever expressed. The rags and the self surrender, the purity and the power, the belief that they spoke not of themselves but for the Lord, have been the same in all ages. It is impossible to feel compassion in this degree and not express it in this manner. All just anger is compassion. The terrible wrath of these men is as comprehensible as their hymns or their triumph. There is no child that reads Isaiah whose nature does not respond to him, because the course of feeling in him is true to life. Between the Old Testament and the New we see a perfectly coherent development of the same passion of the same race into its higher kind. Both forms of it have changed. In the New Testament the love has become specialized into that particular and especial regard for the soul of each individual man for which we have no counterpart; and the prostration, the adoration for God the Father, the identification of the individual with God the Father, has received expression in forms which one can refer to but not describe. The kingdom of heaven is within you.

That modern philanthropy which has been overcoming the world during the last century and has put a spirit of religion into politics, is expressed in ten thousand dogmas and formulas. These things are the hieroglyphics of the most complex period in history, but they all read Love.

The love of man for his fellows is the substantial content of every ideal, of every reform. In so far as any political cry is valuable, it represents this and nothing more. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, The Declaration of Independence, Utilitarianism, Fourierism, Socialism, Prohibition, Christian Science and the Salvation Army carry the same message; and it is only because of this truth, and in spite of the fact that it is always wrapped up in every kind of falsehood, that they move the world forward. Take socialism. This thing is the logical outcome of the passion of pity at work in men who believe that the desire for property is the controlling factor in human arrangements. The selfishness of the individual has been assumed as a fundamental law in that school of thought, which has been dominating all our thought, and which we habitually accept as final. It receives support from a superficial view of human nature, and time out of mind has been the belief of shallow people. But the great intellect and the great labor of the socialists have been unable to make any impression upon the mind of a man. We know that their reasoning is foolish. It is to the heart that their appeal is made. Bellamy’s book sells by the hundred thousand to tender-hearted people. It is a plea for humanity. It is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The function of Socialism is clear. It is a religious reaction going on in an age which thinks in terms of money. We are very nearly at the end of it, because we are very nearly at the end of the age. Some people believe they hate the wealth of the millionaire. They denounce corporations and trusts, as if these things had hurt them. They strike at the symbol. What they really hate is the irresponsible rapacity which these things typify, and which nothing but moral forces will correct. In so far as people seek the cure in property-laws they are victims of the plague. The cure will come entirely from the other side; for as soon as the millionaires begin to exert and enjoy the enormous power for good which they possess, everybody will be glad they have the money.

Socialism was useful, but as a theory it was fated from the beginning, because its prophets and saints are themselves spurred on by a different motive from that which they evoke in others. They offer us a religion that assumes that human nature is other than it is, a religion not based upon self-sacrifice, and so not based upon an appeal to primary passion, a religion beseeching us to make other people comfortable. Now the only motive which will make men labor for the comfort of others, is a belief that this is the quickest way of saving their souls. If souls are to be saved only through their own unselfish activity, then it is a lie to hold up property as a goal. The laboring man can be made happy only by the same means as the merchant. They must be saved together. The matter of the physical support of the individual follows in the wake of a regard for his soul, but never precedes it. The awakening of the spirit of individualism will bring support to the artisan by bringing in hand work. The machine work with which we have been content represents a loss of religion in the buyer proportionate to the selfishness of the times. No system based on thrift will displace it, but any movement based on self-sacrifice will tend to correct it. While socialism is worrying out the proof that a wise distribution of property will bring in virtue and happiness, other and directer formulations of the truth will have seized the spirits of men and saved the people.