THE GREAT UNREST
(This article was written for “Nash’s Magazine” two years before the War, and was on its appearance prefaced by the following Editor’s Note.)
Editor’s Note.—While “Nash’s Magazine” cheerfully presents the following very radical and profoundly interesting article from the brilliant pen of Miss Marie Corelli, this Magazine should not in any sense be held accountable for either the Author’s views or her expression of them.
“Ye hypocrites! Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”
Such was the question put to the people by the Founder of the Christian Faith two thousand years ago—a question not yet answered. Lack of discernment is still as much as ever one of humanity’s chief attributes, or is it perhaps less a lack of discernment than an unwillingness to discern? “Ye hypocrites!” said the Christ. Is it not, after all, sheer hypocrisy which, in the form of social convention, does so obsess Man that, though conscious of approaching storm, he prefers to bury his head, ostrich-like, in a sand-heap of his own delusions in order that he may be as blind and as deaf as possible to the lurid glare and wild uproar of coming disaster? He instinctively knows disaster is imminent—even at his very doors—and that it will presently swoop relentlessly down upon him, perhaps tossing him with other fragments of creation into a chaos from which he shall scarcely emerge with a sound skin; yet knowing, he pretends not to know, and plays the fool with himself and destiny!
To-day, now, at this very moment, all over the civilised world, this terrible game of “playing the fool” is going on with reckless speed and continuity. I use the word “terrible” advisedly, for nothing more pregnant with all the elements of positive terror was ever seen than the present-time spectacle of Human Humbug set face to face with that Eternal Equity which has existed always, and which ever will exist without any change in its Divine Source, Cause and Intention. Man, endowed with splendid gifts of reason, imagination and psychic power, is everywhere gambling away his highest birthright for gold; Man, whom the celestial forces have led step by step through carefully measured gradations of intellectual evolution till he has arrived at the open gateways of Science, there to behold the infinitely marvellous benefits he may possess and enjoy, still insults the Giver of all his good by his fumbling forms of faith and worship suited only to barbaric minds in a state of embryo—Man, semi-apathetic and in many cases wholly indifferent to the higher roads of progress and to the steady unfolding of that endless perspective of order and beauty intended for the individual happiness of every individual soul, still makes wilful havoc of his own carefully organised civilisations, like a child who builds a house of cards and blows it down with a breath—and this because his civilisations are mostly of a flimsy structure, having no foundation on any fundamental Law which Nature can or will tolerate for more than a very brief time. All history teaches this with stern and pitiless repetition; and the signs and portents which gave warning of the downfall of the Roman Empire were of precisely the same character as the signs and portents which warn us of similar downfalls impending for great nations to-day. The scheme of Creation is plainly meant to be a perpetual movement towards perpetual advancement—this truth is clearly demonstrated in all natural evolution, and Man is perforce compelled, despite himself, to move with the onward and upward process—but he invariably “hangs back” and tries to put a stop on the wheel, with the result that he is himself crushed and ground to powder in the wheel’s relentless revolving. He makes religions, laws and morals for himself which have no prototype in the order of Nature, and he thereby stands rebelliously opposed to the Supreme Intelligence, whose design of life being exact mathematics, swerves not by so much as the shadow of a hair.
Hence arises, and always will arise, trouble. Trouble and unrest! The sum of things never comes right, add it up, subtract, or multiply as we will. We persist in our childish efforts to fit in figures which have no place or part in the Divine quantities. Now and then in some sudden flash of higher consciousness, we see the folly of our actions—but seeing, we pretend to be blind. Some of us devote ourselves to a study of the sciences, and we peep through a hundred loop-holes into a vista of shining truths, any one of which would help us to draw closer to God—yet presently we turn away and talk of predestination and original sin, and feign to believe in a Deity whose rage against His own Creation is so insensate and barbaric as only to be pacified by Blood! Blood—blood! The cry of the vengeful, the murderous, the cruel, the tyrannous in all ages of the world!—yet we do not hesitate to insult the Creator of the whole Cosmos by endowing Him with this animal and un-God-like craving! He, who holds the starry heavens in the hollow of His Hand—from whose expressed Thought solar systems are born like blossoms in the fields of ether—He, whose vast love broods tenderly over all that He hath made, even to the nesting bird hidden under a bunch of green leaves—“not one shall fall to the ground without your Father”—even He it is whom daily we wrong and blaspheme by our social methods of life and forms of worship, by our deliberate opposition to His Laws, and by the amazingly insolent indifference we exhibit to His inviolate Will as shown through the reflection of His Mind in visible Nature.
And so it happens that, after a certain space of time in which we are offered fresh chances of amendment or betterment which we seldom take, things begin to go wrong. We know not how or where the mischief first started, because it has stolen upon us by gradual and insidious degrees, and we never dream of looking for the root of the evil in ourselves or in our ancestry. But we do become slowly and reluctantly aware that we are not on the right track—that “something” is about to happen which will upset all our most cherished plans and push us off our present road of what we are pleased to call “progress” in a sufficiently disastrous manner. We have no time to retrace our steps and look for the way we have missed, for we find that we are running down hill with a singular self-imposed velocity which would make any sort of a stop almost impossible—while to go back would mean to climb a very steep and difficult ascent, an exercise for which we are neither prepared nor willing. We have no idea how we managed the muddle in which we find ourselves, but muddle it is and muddle it remains.
And then we enter upon the doubtful period—the kind of period in which the whole world is living to-day—a period of vague uneasiness, restlessness, and feverish suspense, looking for we know not what, dissatisfied with things as they are, yet unable to decide how they ought to be. Then is the hour of the brazen-mouthed religious ranter and the political demagogue. The nations of the earth are disquieted mentally and spiritually—the pulpit braggart assumes to teach them, and the upstart in politics offers to reform them. And like the waves of the sea before a storm breaks, the people surge to and fro in billowy masses, with here and there a gleam of hope among them like light on spraying foam, but for the most part moving in darkness and deep unrest. For the time is past when the balm of old tradition can be applied as a soothing salve to the spiritual wounds of humanity. Men do not want to be soothed, but roused—fired to noblest energy, greatest aims and splendid achievement—and they need to feel that their efforts to reach the Highest are worth the making, and that the fight which they enter upon means victory in the end.