The War and the Churches

by Joseph McCabe

This experience might be enlarged indefinitely, but one or two instances will suffice for my purpose. The soundness of these instances which I quote I have established elsewhere, and the general truth to which I refer may be sufficiently gathered from the words of the clergy themselves. The rhetorical way in which they characterise our times is more or less typical of the carelessness of their judgments and the strength of their prejudices. One group of clerical writers, which generally includes the reigning Pope, speak in the darkest terms of our age and suggest that a sensible degeneration has followed the decrease of the influence of the Churches. Another group, considering the remarkable spread of idealism in our generation, the growing demand for peace, justice, and sobriety, claim that this moral progress, which they cannot deny, is due to some tardy recognition of the spirit of Christ: a strange contention, seeing that our age is less and less willing to hear the words of Christ and ascribes its sentiments to entirely different inspiration. Hence there are a few who frankly admit that the idealism of modern times is to them a rebuke and a mystery. One of these more sensitive religious writers once confessed to me that the fact that the times became better while the influence of Christianity grew less was to him a perplexing truth.

The really honest social student, who does not measure his age by his prejudices, but fashions his theories according to the carefully ascertained facts, will try to discover the causes of this phenomenon. In those wide and varied areas where it is observed, we cannot say that anything has taken the place of Christianity. The Press sometimes flatters itself that it has taken the place of the pulpit, but opinions will differ in regard to its efficacy as a moral agency. On the whole, it is too apt to reflect the moral sentiments of the more reactionary, who are generally the most self-assertive, and it has no moral, as distinct from political, leadership. Then there are Ethical and kindred societies which hold "services" of a humanitarian character, and are to many people a substitute for the Christian Churches. Their influence is, however, restricted to a few thousand people in the whole country, and signs are not wanting that their usefulness will be only transitory. The experience of any careful observer is that the mass of people who cease to attend church desire and need no substitute whatever for Christianity. The Rationalist literature which many of them read is, as a rule, of a high idealist character; but here again the influence is very restricted. No organised influence is at work to any great extent as a successor to Christianity, yet it is indubitable that, as Christian influence wanes, the temper of the age improves.

This improvement must have an adequate cause, and it would be merely another form of crude social reasoning and of sectarian prejudice to say, in the rich language of the older anti-clericals, that breaking "the fetters of superstition and priestcraft" led of itself to such a result. But this sanguine rhetoric does contain or obscure a certain truth. In plain human language, when you prevent a man from relying on the old traditional inspirations, he may for a time be tempted to act without inspiration. In the matter of his dealings with his fellows it is an undeniable fact that, on the whole, he has not been thus tempted. It is absurd to heap up all the contemporary instances of corruption in trade and politics, looseness in domestic life, and so on, unless you make a similar study of the vices and crimes of an earlier and more Christian generation, and carefully compare the two. It is not a question whether there is evil in our generation; it is a question whether there is more or less evil than in earlier generations. I must be pardoned for reiterating this, because, although this comparison is essential for forming an accurate judgment on the moral effect of the decay of Christianity, it is rarely instituted with the least pretence of rigour. I have sufficiently studied it in earlier works (especially The Bible in Europe), and will not repeat the facts. Cotter Morison, whom I quoted on an early page, was wrong in his expectation. The change from Christian to humanist inspiration is taking place without disorder and with increasing advantage.

The solution of this apparent problem is really not obscure. If the genuine basis of human conduct needed an elaborate search—if it had to be revealed by a Deity or laboriously established by moral theologians or moral philosophers—no doubt the age of transition would be an age of disorder, and a very comprehensive educational organisation would be needed. But the true basis of human conduct is simple. There are, of course, Rationalists who feel that some very abstruse "science of ethics" has to be constructed as the solid foundation of conduct; but this has as little relation to the conduct of ordinary men as the learned pedants of the science of prosody have to ordinary speakers of prose. Experience is the real base and guide of conduct, and it forces itself on every man and woman, even on the child. "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you" is the first principle of morals; and to inculcate it you need neither the thunders of Jupiter nor the impressive abstractions of a science of ethics: nor do you need any moral genius or philosophical skill to discover it. It is a rule of life that suggests itself spontaneously. It is a natural and prompt expression of the fact that our life is social: our acts have the closest relation to others besides ourselves. Now and again, perhaps, a man is tempted to assert his own personality, or seek his own gratification, in such a way as to ignore his fellows; but he is usually arrested before long by the simple experience that he himself suffers from the actions of others just as they may suffer from his conduct. It is a lesson of life which one needs no power of analysis to learn.

And the chief reason why the abandonment of the old doctrines is proceeding without any moral degeneration is that this experience was really always the basis of general morality. We need not question—it would be absurd to question—that refined natures have received moral aid from their belief in the presence of God, or in a desire to please God by accepting the law of virtue as a declaration of his will; though we must be equally candid in admitting that men and women of this nature have not been observed to deteriorate when they sacrifice their religious beliefs, as thousands of them have done. On the other hand, we will hardly question that numbers of people of coarser nature have been deterred from evil-doing by dread of supernatural punishment. It is, however, notorious in the moral history of Europe that these religious beliefs have been consistent with a vast amount of transgression of the decalogue: more than we witness in any civilised country in our own time. How, then, are we to discover what were the real springs of conduct in the mass of ordinarily decent people? It seems to me that the only accurate method is to avoid theories and consider people in the flesh. Do our Christian friends—did we ourselves in Christian days—refrain from lying, dishonesty, injustice, cruelty, and injury, solely or mainly because God forbids them or will punish them? I have not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its human and social value.

The only line of the decalogue about which there is likely to be any dispute in this regard is that putting restraint on sexual relations. I have not to consider here a subject so remote from my immediate interest, and will observe only that any act which hurts either an individual or the social interest will as plainly come under a humanitarian law as the practice of lying: acts which inflict no injury and have been forbidden only on mystic grounds are not likely to remain on the moral code of the future. But I am concerned here with a definite issue, and need discuss general morality only in so far as that issue is affected.

Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God have been totally ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of peace until a genuine human passion was substituted for that empty phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a struggle. The plain fact is that it was of no use, and is of no use to-day. There is, indeed, reason to think that we should make more progress if we entirely discarded figures of speech like "the brotherhood of men." The fact that we are all children of God, or children of Eve, or children of some Tertiary anthropoid, does not very obviously impose on us the duty not to take up arms in an international quarrel.

The ultimate basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy, though in an advanced social order this sentiment approves itself to the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality in the world when the word "morality," with all its mystic entanglements, is discarded, and we speak plainly of social law. Violence, the infliction of pain and injustice, is one of the most obvious infractions of social law, quite apart from any religious commandments. Its social evil is so obvious that the community has, at an early date in its development, elaborated a special machinery for restraining it, and has imposed penalties in this world, whatever it thinks about the next. There may be questions raised, and one can understand people who are confined to a religious environment feeling a genuine concern, about other sections of moral law; but it would be obviously absurd to think that a humanitarian ethic would fail here. There have been attempts in modern times to question the validity of ethical law altogether. In so far as this movement aims at stripping moral law of its mysticism and fearlessly investigating its traditional content, it is admirable and will grow; but in so far as these moral rebels would resent restraint of any kind, and pronounce the freedom of every individual impulse, they seem to overlook a factor of great importance—the impulse of retaliation. A pretty state of society we should have if such a theory were generally, or largely, carried into practice.

But these are academic vagaries, like those of the mystic or the moral theologian. Whatever be the future fortune of Christian legends, men are not likely to sacrifice the peace and security of social life to such theories of freedom any more than they are likely to expose property to a general scramble. The instinct of sympathy is now growing deeper in every century. Most of the great improvements of social life (in its widest sense) during the nineteenth century, which we have inherited, were due to that development of sympathy. It matters not whether the reformer was Christian or non-Christian—Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale or Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill—the impulse was sympathy with suffering fellow-humans. All the hope of improvement in the twentieth century looks to a continued growth of that sentiment. It becomes a veritable passion in certain natures, as long as there are large and cruel evils to redress; and this passion of a few leading spirits, communicating something of its fire to the colder mass, is the great cause of progress. Surely that is the correct interpretation of the progressive life of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? Men realised that to cultivate sympathy because it was enjoined by religion was a more or less mercantile procedure: it was worth cultivating for its own sake.

Here we have the reply to those who, unfamiliar with any but their own religious environment, ask what place there will be for sympathy in an intellectual or nationalistic age. It is a very grave error to suppose either that our age is becoming less emotional or that Rationalism has no place for emotions. In pursuing its task during the nineteenth century Rationalism was an intensely emotional movement. Mr G. K. Chesterton, in his Victorian Age in Literature, speaks of J. S. Mill's "hard rationalism in religion" and "hard egoism in ethics." Like very many other statements in that lamentable book, these are inexplicably unjust. Mill was so far from being "hard" in religion that he ended his days in a kind of sentimental theism; he was so far from being a "hard egoist" in ethics that he declared that he would burn in hell for ever rather than lie at the supposed bidding of a Deity. Robert Ingersoll, the most popular Rationalist of that age, was—I judge from his private letters, not his ornate speeches—a man of the most tender and fine sentiment. It is simply ludicrous to suppose that, because we do not admit emotion to be a test of the accuracy of statements of fact (as all religious dogmas claim to be), we do not find any room for emotion in life. Is the whole of man's life an affirmation about reality or criticism of such affirmation? This supposed "hardness"—I detest these vague phrases, but one knows what is meant—of the Rationalist temper is one of the strangest myths the clergy have invented.