But why, we ask, should Mr. Wells feel this passionate desire, if all the failures and uglinesses of life are "necessary and important"? How, on this assumption, are existing social ills to be remedied—nay, why should they be remedied, why should they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark of "unbelief."
Mr. Wells, however, while his influence is a very considerable one, utters his teaching from outside the Christian Church, and very properly disavows the Christian name; what must give us pause is to find the monistic ethics being preached and taught by official exponents of the Christian religion. What, e.g., can we think of a statement like the following, which we quote from the columns of a religious journal?
There are people who think it is an evidence of superior Culture to show themselves pained by certain things; but it is not really that; they are pained because they are not cultured enough, or in the right way. . .
Nothing is good or ill
But thinking makes it so.
They think it desirable to dislike things because they dislike them; if they thought it desirable not to dislike them, they would not dislike them.
Again, no one will accuse this writer of want of frankness; according to him, there is simply no such thing as objective evil—acts and individuals have no moral qualities or characters, but are such as we think them, and our business is so to think of them that they will not pain us. {60} If we only knew aright, we should not regard anything as bad. If we are pained by the thought of fifty thousand hungry children in London elementary schools, or by the condition of Regent Street at night, it is because we are not "cultured" enough—we have not the right gnosis. When we reflect that anyone who consistently believes that "nothing is good or ill, but thinking makes it so," will inevitably, first or last, apply that comforting maxim to his own acts, we can see in what direction the ethics of Monism—in reality a return to the ultra-subjectivism of the Sophists, who made man the measure of all things—are likely to lead men. And yet, if the monistic presuppositions are valid—if the universe in all its phases expresses only one will—we do not see how these conclusions can be repelled.
But it is, perhaps, our last illustration, drawn from yet another writer of the same school, which will exhibit both the teaching under discussion and its practical dangers in the clearest light. We are told that—
There is no will that is not God's will. I do not mean that yours is not real, or that any man's is not real, but I do mean that nothing can happen to any of God's children—no matter how evil the intention of the person who does it, or how seemingly meaningless the calamity that causes it—which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to us, and His call upon our highest energies. In a true and real sense, therefore, it is God's own doing and meant for our greater glory; . . . I believe in the infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else.
{61}
Those who will take the moderate trouble of translating these words from the abstract into the concrete will need no further demonstration of the moral implications of this type of Monism. "There is no will"—not even the most brutalised or the most debauched—"that is not God's will." "Nothing can happen to any of God's children"—say, to the natives of the Congo or to a Jewish community during a Russian pogrom—but is God's call upon their highest energies: wherefore they ought, assuredly, to be thankful to King Leopold's emissaries and the Tsar's faithful Black Hundreds! But let us apply this thesis to yet another case, which will bring out its full character: if an English girl—one of God's children—is snared away by a ruffian, under pretext of honest employment, to some Continental hell, then we are to understand that the physical and moral ruin which awaits the victim is "in some way the sacrament of God's love" to her—"in a true and real sense it is God's own doing," and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else—sin, and shame, and remorse, and heartbreak, and despair; against the first of which we need to be warned, in order that we may escape the rest.