There is no ground left on which religion can appeal to the conscience of such a generation. In the eighteenth century Wesley and Whitefield sent through the decaying masses of England a vitalising breath as they proclaimed the joyful gospel of deliverance from sin, and men arose from the mire with lives transfigured. In our day religion can find no such approach and no such triumph. For like the whispering of an idle breeze is a proclamation of sin's forgiveness to those who know no sin. For us it is but a childish malady which we have long outgrown. The passion of sin forgiven will no longer thrill our souls.
III
And this life which our modern writers describe is one of appalling dreariness. As the new generation grow in knowledge every ideal vanishes; as they move upward in the social scale they shut out God. The Chapel loses its power; men wear Wesley's clothes but know not his spirit. Arnold Bennett makes us see the dying epoch. He describes the whole town assembled in the market-square to celebrate the centenary of Sunday schools. The vast crowd sing 'Rock of Ages' and 'There is a Fountain filled with Blood.' The volume of sound is overwhelming. 'Look at it,' says Edwin Clayhanger to Hilda Lessways; 'it only wants the Ganges at the bottom of the square.' 'Even if we don't believe,' she replies, 'we needn't make fun.' And amid the singing crowd, mocked at and jostled, struggles Mr. Shushions, the oldest Sunday-school teacher in the Five Towns, who long ago had rescued the Clayhangers from the workhouse, but now had 'lived too long' and 'survived his dignity.' 'The impression given was that the flesh would be unpleasant and uncanny to the touch.' It is a grim picture of an effete life still moving, mummified and repulsive, among men.
The old ideal was dead; but there was no ideal new-born. Life was dreary, but happiness was still pursued. When the family would move to the new house where science surrounded them with all the appliances of comfort and luxury, then Edwin Clayhanger was convinced he would find happiness. The day comes and they move to the new house. But that very morning there is a quarrel with his father. He had been ingenuous enough to believe that the new house somehow would mean the rebirth of himself and his family. 'Strange delusion! The bath-splashings and the other things gave him no pleasure, because he was saying to himself all the time, "There is going to be a row this morning. There is going to be a regular shindy this morning."' They come to the new house but they cannot sit down to dinner together.
'Father thinks I've been stealing his damned money,' snaps out the son in a barking voice, and refuses to meet him at table. And the father takes his dinner alone. The end of the ghastly quarrel is that the son gets an increase of half a crown to his weekly wage! That is the measure of the 'new birth' which he had so fondly anticipated. He does not realise that after being emptied from vessel to vessel, however much larger and more beautiful the vessels become, filthy water remains filthy water still.
What is there left to those for whom the vision of God thus fades? The fathers amassed money, and they had the joy of conflict, and a sense of duty. But the sons have not the joy of conflict. They inherit houses built for them, and money for which they have not toiled. What are they to do? Their fathers found endless interest in Church and Chapel, and they gave of their wealth. The sons no longer believe in Church and Chapel. They have no traditions of social service. They regard the class from which their fathers sprang with aversion and with fear. Their favourite topic of conversation is the shortcomings of the working-classes. One whole winter they denounced the iniquity of the State making any provision, however pitifully small, for the decayed veterans who fall out of the ranks of toil; another winter they declaimed with bitterness against the crime of the State making provision through insurance for the ill-health of their servants and employees! They have little taste for books, and money cannot buy the sense by which beauty floods the heart. There is nothing left them but self-indulgence. To that they sacrifice everything. Food and clothes and physical pleasure fill up the circuit of the days. Then weariness seizes them. They become the captives of boredom. They rush hither and thither. They carry to the Highlands a life which is intolerable hi London; they bring back to London a life which is intolerable in the Highlands. They live lives isolated from the joy and innocence of childhood—for that is the ideal they have made their own. They rush after anything which will promise the 'easier and quicker passing of the impracticable hours.' They still maintain some connection with the Church, but their attitude is that of patronage and not of allegiance. The preacher must be an echo of their voices or they will have none of him. There must be no preaching of stern duty or of judgment to come—that is antiquated! When they come to church there must be the gospel of soothing rest—fulsomely administered in a saccharine form! Religion must be a narcotic; its end that they may forget. But even then it must be in the smallest doses and at long intervals. Thus their places in church are getting emptier and emptier, and the day of worship saw their cars stand in serried rows by wayside inns. They have created for themselves a grey, dull world. 'If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts, all or most of them,' wrote Carlyle, 'then will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for some centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.' And that is what they were fast doing when the thunder of the guns echoed doom. They were without God and without hope in the world.
To some this may appear an exaggerated and distorted picture. It may in fact be pointed out that in these last years there was a greater activity of social service directed towards the help of the poor and miserable than ever before. That is true. But it is true also that it was wholly ineffective. It was the activity mainly of ignorance. It was the throwing of half-crowns to the starving; it was not the giving of love. They gave charity; they did not give themselves. They acquiesced with hardly a protest in the social organisation which inevitably swelled the ranks of the poor and increased the burden of their misery. By that social organisation many of them profited. They gave doles; but it was to pacify their poor consciences. They instituted 'charity organisation societies,' making charity as it were a deal on the Stock Exchange. If only they had thought of it they would have instituted a 'Divine Spirit Organisation Society.' The one would not be more irreverent than the other; for charity is the fruit of the Spirit. They were to have charity without the Spirit—so they adopted the methods of the market-place. By means of ledgers and visitors they were to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving. Their charity was to be directed towards the deserving. They forgot that there could not be such a thing as charity for the deserving—only justice! There was the noise of much machinery, but the noise was made by a handful. The rest gave only of their lucre. And all the time, while they studied the social problem and organised charity, the measure of human misery went on increasing. The rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer, amid the greatest activity of social reformers. It was all futile because it was uninstructed. It only palliated the pain; it never sought to dry up the fountains of human misery. The professional charity organisers saw the human wrecks being borne on the flood to doom, and from the banks, in security, they threw them life-belts. But they never thought of plunging themselves into the wild waters and breasting the flood at the risk of their own lives that they might save. Man cannot save man without blood, and there was only water in their veins.
IV
That life manifested the slum at its core in sundry unmistakable forms. Its literature was largely the record of man wallowing in the mud; and that Art which aforetime made humanity kneel at the shrine of the Mother and the Child became the handmaid of vice. In the name of Art the new generation demanded freedom, but the freedom was a freedom divorced from modesty and reverence. Only the play or the song that evoked the unclean laugh now crowded the theatre. But most striking of all was the manner in which they sought to escape from the ennui which afflicted their souls. Weird and vulgar dances had their day; grotesque attire claimed its devotees; but the chief way of escape was that which led to the feet of charlatans. A whole group of new religions sprang up; mysteries from the Ganges vied with mysteries imported from Chicago, and both found multitudes to seek after them. The growth of centuries, the slow evolution of truth handed down by the saintly and the wise—that was as nothing weighed against the dictum of a woman in America or a Hindu in Benares!
On a grey winter afternoon, some three years ago, I happened to arrive at one of our most beautiful cities—a city that justly prides itself on its culture. As I walked along the world's most beautiful street I was struck by the sight of a long line of motors that overflowed up a roadway leading to the turreted hill. I asked a motor-man what was happening that day. 'There is a black prophet,' said he, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, 'preaching in the Assembly Hall.' I needed no further explanation. I know nothing about the said prophet except that he isn't a Christian. That was of course the secret of his power. Because he wasn't, the leisured and the cultured sat in serried ranks at his feet. Perhaps he would give them what they had lost—peace! And there came the memory of another civilisation sinking into decay when the mysteries of the Nile and the Orontes established themselves on the banks of the Tiber, and the weary citizens of Rome, sated by a world's luxury, deemed no charlatan emerging from the East too gross for acceptance or his mystery too incredible for belief. In the dawn of its decay Rome bestowed 'the freedom of the city on all the gods of mankind.' In our day London and Edinburgh have followed along the same road. The God all-holy and loving, the All-Father—we have cast Him off. But no superstition is too mean for us to kneel at its shrine. History is truly a monotonous record. Nations and empires have all gone the same road to perdition. And they never knew they were treading it.