The War and the Churches

by Joseph McCabe

We look back to-day on a long series of processes and circumstances which culminate in the war. There is the whole history of Germany for a hundred and fifty years inspiring the German people with a bias toward aggressive war; there are the economic and geographical circumstances which, at the end of the nineteenth century, begin to make it think again of aggressive war; there is the overflowing population, bred by order of the clergy who stupidly condemn an artificial restriction of births; there is the coincident trouble of Austria with the Slavs, of England with its subject peoples, and so on. In the eyes of the careful student a hundred lines of circumstance and development have led to this war. The melodramatic idea that it all springs from the free will of the Kaiser, or of a group of soldiers and statesmen, need not be seriously considered. Moreover, even when we introduce the personal element—and the personality of the Kaiser has had a very considerable influence—it is foolish to throw the whole burden on free will. The mood and outlook and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements, whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements?

Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan-Turkish War and the Mexican War. So we might go over the wars of the nineteenth century and all earlier wars. The "permissiveness" or indifference of the ruler of the universe grows amazingly. In the meantime we had mighty catastrophes like the sinking of the Titanic and other ships, the earthquakes at Messina and elsewhere, famines and epidemics and floods in various places, and great numbers of murders, railway and other accidents, etc. We begin to ask where the ruling of the universe comes in at all, and, as far as human events go, all that we can gather in the way of reply is that sometimes individuals who pray very fervently get their diseases healed or their coffers filled; and even these claims do not pass rational inquiry.

Now here is the precise difficulty of the unbeliever, and this present tragedy makes it acute. We ask our neighbour, or seek in some learned theological treatise, what are the indications of this government of the universe, and we are told about the making of stars and the decoration of flowers and the putting of instincts into animals or pretty patterns on their skins. But when we point out that the really important thing in our part of the universe is this human life of ours, imperfectly protected as yet against disease and malice (which is largely disease) and natural forces, the theologian has no clear evidence to produce. Even the evidence he draws from stars and flowers and peacocks' tails and sunsets, with which he is, as a rule, very imperfectly acquainted, is, of course, heatedly disputed, and the proper authorities on these subjects are, on the whole, not well disposed toward his interpretation. But we need not consider that here. Where we should most logically expect the hand of Providence is in the human order, because in that order catastrophe is infinitely more important, in view of man's capacity for pain. Yet it is precisely in regard to this order that the theologian is vaguest and least satisfactory. He talks grandly of God moving every atom in the universe, counting the hairs of our heads, numbering (but not preventing) the fall of the sparrows, and so on; but when we ask for the evidence of God's concern with contemporary human events he is very vague if they are good events, and, if they are evil, he hastily disclaims any interference of the Deity. Some of our more advanced theologians are claiming that the finest improvement they have made in their science is to have brought God from without the universe (where no theologian had ever put him) and make him immanent in it. But they seem just as incapable as the others to trace his interposition in human events.

Theologians still maintain a valiant and stubborn fight against scientific men, but they do not fight historians. They are very keen on maintaining the influence of God over atoms and stars and roses and birds, but not half so keen to vindicate it in the life of man. The story of the world, our world, may be divided into three chapters: a chapter describing the moulding of the globe and the rocks, a chapter describing the slow evolution of the plants and animals, and a chapter describing the antics and fortunes of man. Some may surrender the first chapter to science, some the second chapter, but it looks as if they all surrender the third. They have long been accustomed to surrender the early part, and very much the longer and more laborious part, of man's story to natural forces, or the devil. Then there was a melodramatic notion that God, after the lapse of hundreds of thousands of years, began to take an interest in one very small people and kept revealing things to it, and smiting its enemies, until Christianity was given to the world. History tells the story in a totally different way. We find the stream of moral and religious evolution flowing steadily on nineteen hundred years ago, much as we do to-day. At this point, of course, the theologian does make a struggle with the historian. In proportion to the imperfectness of his culture and the backwardness and conservatism of his Church, he fights for miraculous interpositions in human events nineteen hundred years ago. But we need not delay to examine that difference of opinion, because the later period suffices for my purpose.

A few theologians, not well acquainted with history, see another miraculous interposition in the fourth century, when Christianity was established; and the Roman Catholic—in the intellectual rear, as usual—believes in hundreds of miraculous interpositions, in small matters, as late as the year 1914. But in order to take a broad view of the matter we may leave these controversies with the more reactionary on one side. The history of Europe for the last fifteen centuries at least is now entrusted to able laymen, and it has been purged of divine interpositions. Innumerable myths and legends, often based on what are now acknowledged to be spurious documents, have been cast out of the science, and we are presented with a quite continuous and purely natural sequence of events. Religious historians like Bishop Creighton or Lord Bryce do not find their periods broken by divine interpositions; the writers of the Cambridge History do not occasionally arrest us before some great event and warn us that the chain of human causation seems to be obscure or discontinuous. There are, of course, problems of history, but they are not obscurities which, like the obscure places in science, tempt the theologian to enter and claim a divine interposition. The story is from beginning to end—to use Nietzsche's phrase—"human, all too human." On the whole, as it has been hitherto written, it is a story of wars, and, though patriotic piety puts its gloss on the issue of a war here and there, the historian does not find any serious problem in them. No French historian will now claim divine action in the Napoleonic wars, and assuredly few of us are prepared to see the finger of God in the fortunate issue of Prussia's many campaigns since Frederick the Great.

Whatever we may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of miracle or revelation in his action than when he discovers the use of steam or of aluminium or of the spectroscope. His mind expands and his ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe prefixes to his Faust, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take the whole story as the gradual development of human intelligence and emotion under unfavourable political conditions, hampered by a despotic and perverse clergy, and it seems natural enough.

This is the impression one gets from history, and the nearer history is to our own time and the better we know it, the less it suggests a divine guidance. There is something parochial or rural about the average Christian way of looking at events. One day the German Christian goes to church to thank God for driving the Russians out of East Prussia; the next day the English Christian thanks the same God for killing or wounding 20,000 Germans at Neuve Chapelle—with the help of 350 guns. Yet such things as these are the only claims we have offered to us of the action of God in human events. Neither the steps that man takes onward nor the steps that he takes backward are ascribed to divine influence. All that is claimed is that when a ship goes down, for instance, he saves the saved, and "permits" the rest to be drowned; when a war has been raging for a few months by his "permission," he puts a stop to it when one army is worn out. The unbeliever is really entitled to a good deal of sympathy for his inability to follow this tortuous reasoning with confidence. One cannot entirely blame him for being more interested in the heart of man than in the petals of a rose.

These considerations are, of course, not novel. I am only applying to this special case of the war a difficulty that has been discussed in all ages, and has been acutely felt by very able religious thinkers. How a group of bishops can sit down to write, in very deliberate and elegant language, that such a calamity as this makes the soul more sensible of "the approach of Christ" is one of the many little mysteries of the clerical mind. It has precisely the opposite effect in any logical mind. When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd suddenly into the lap of death; when vast provinces are laid desolate by war, and we see the tens of thousands clasping the hand of their loved ones for the last time, it seems rather uncanny that this should suggest to any person the approach of Christ. To very many people it is a confirmation of the general impression they get from the world-process and the story of man: that these great forces deploy and interlace and build up and destroy without the slightest intervention from without.

In our time, we must remember, this difficulty had already been enormously increased. St. Augustine, who felt the problem acutely in the prime of his intelligence, had really a very much lighter task than the modern divine. He had merely to suggest why evil was permitted in the narrow world he knew; and he had the great advantage of being able to appeal to a primitive sin and primitive punishment of the race. The problem became more serious when original sin, or at least the notion that the race might justly be damned for one man's fault, was abandoned. It became graver still when science discovered the tombs of inhabitants of this globe who had lived during millions of earlier years, and showed that the very law of their life and progress was struggle against evil. Every attempt to minimise the struggle of those earlier ages has failed. At a time when there was no possibility of "spiritual advantage" there was acute consciousness of pain, the struggle and suffering were prodigious. Theistic literature of the last half century, growing more weary and more wistful in each decade, reflects the increasing difficulty. If any man can see in this war a relief of the difficulty, and not an appalling accentuation and illustration of it, he must be gifted with a peculiar type of mind and emotion. It is more probable that an increasing number will conclude that, if God is indifferent to these things, they will be indifferent to him. Professor William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, declared that the only gods the men of the new generation would recognise would be gods of some use to them. The war does not encourage the chances of the Christian God.

A few modern religious thinkers seem to imagine that they have found some relief by devising the formula that God's plan is to "co-operate with man," and in those modern advances which I have freely admitted they see indications of this co-operation. This new formula is not a whit better than the other phrases which have, at various stages, been regarded by religions people as profound thoughts. In the recent history of moral progress we have, as a rule, a minority of high-minded men and women struggling to impress their sentiments on the inert majority. The new theologian is not daunted in the application of his theory by the fact that a large proportion of these pioneers did not believe in God at all, so I will not discuss that aspect; though no doubt the plain man will find it interesting to trace how, in the earlier and more difficult days of modern humanism, so few of the reformers were Christian ministers and so many Rationalists. From the historical point of view, however, we find this line of development quite intelligible. We find, for instance, Robert Owen (a great Rationalist) advocating the substitution of arbitration for war nearly a century ago, and we discover the earlier sources of Owen's enthusiasm in English Radicals like Godwin, who were affected by the early French Revolutionaries, who had been influenced by Rousseau, and so on. It is a quite natural evolution of ideas, as they find a congenial soil in each generation in certain types of temperament. But where are the traces or what was the nature of God's co-operation with these men? Looking to their generally heterodox character and the hostility of the Churches to them, the idea is not without humour; but, even if we reconcile ourselves to this peculiar feature, anything in the nature of positive evidence of divine action is wholly lacking, and we can understand the whole process without it. The theory is merely a desperate and unfounded assertion of men who are determined that God shall not be left out.