In speaking of this faith in human solidarity as Western, I am aware that I am making broad statements which badly need qualification. I am far from wishing to suggest that there is no such sentiment of humanity in the great structures of Asiatic civilization, particularly in the ethical systems of China. But I am persuaded that there is a broad contrast between West and East in this respect, and that in particular there is a significant gulf between the West and Hinduism. In the West, this often inarticulate faith in humanity has acted as a spring of progress. It inspires our faith in democracy, it acts as a perpetual challenge to privilege and oppression, as a constant denial of permanence to divisions of class, nationality, and race. The very difficulty which the orthodox Hindu experiences in appreciating the spiritual meaning of democracy—his feeling that the democratic movement is an irrational blindly selfish confusing of a divine appointed social order—discloses the existence of this gulf. It is not for nothing that the religious traditions of Hinduism trace the four castes back to divine appointment and regard them as coeval with the race. Nor is it without significance that India rejected Buddhism—a movement which challenged caste and whose missionary enthusiasm embodied a broader sentiment of humanity than has yet been woven into Indian civilization. The influence of the West is now renewing the attack on caste which Buddha initiated and failed to accomplish.
Without serious injustice we may claim that this faith in human solidarity has attained clearer expression and exerts greater influence in the West than in the East. To detail its influence is impossible. It underlies our hopes of social reform, it refuses to believe in the subhuman—at least it refuses to believe in the necessity of his continued existence. It inspires the religious enthusiasm with which men embrace Socialism as 'a hope for mankind'. It turns the brotherhood of man into a 'masked word.' As a character in one of St. John Ervine's novels puts it, 'Brother'ood of man, my boy—that's my motter. Brother'ood of man! the 'ole world, see! Not a little bit like England! the 'ole world! all of us! see? No fightin or nothink! Just peace an' 'appiness! Takes your breath away when you think on it. It do, straight.' The same religious impulse is at work in that disease of humanitarianism which distresses Chauvinists—the humanitarianism which Bernhardi denounces in Germany and Mr. Moreton Fullerton deplores in France. It is reflected in the religious life alike of Russia and of France. Paul Sabatier's book is largely concerned with following out the influence of this sense of solidarity in all philosophic and religious schools and in all classes in France. He notes, for example, the anti-clericalism of the French peasant, which does not, however, lead him to embrace the dogmatic negations of Free-thought. The peasant still clings to the rites of the Church through 'the perhaps unconscious desire to perform an act of social solidarity, to meet our fellow-men elsewhere than on the field of material interests and distractions, to accept the rendezvous which they offer to us and we to them, that we may draw together and, more than that—unite and unify'. In another quarter we may witness a new feeling for humanity resulting from the throwing together of diverse racial elements in the melting-pot of the United States. Zangwill's play might be cited as a document of this larger faith, while Jane Addams has sympathetically described its genesis in her Newer Ideals of Peace. Yet another expression of this instinctive faith may be discovered in the broad human interest of much of our modern literature and art. For the standard of orthodoxy in this connexion requires not only that we respond to a grand conception of humanity as a whole, but that also in particulars we are loyal to the Terentian tag, 'Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.' The worthier side of modern realism has done full justice to this motto.
The expressions of this faith in human solidarity are so various, and its influence so pervading, that it is not surprising to find some modern thinkers looking to it as the essence of religion. In the sociological theory of religion, it is suggested that to become aware of society and its claims constitutes religion itself. A man is converted when his soul is 'congregationalized'. There is even a tendency to find the highest element in religious experience in a strong feeling of one's unity with one's fellows. Such a feeling of endless sympathy and tolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for the whole. For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faith in humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet. But a second characteristic of Western thought about religion forbids any idealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond the indiscriminate catholicism of 'The Open Road'. This characteristic may be defined as our faith in the worth of activity and in the reality of progress. We believe in the unity of mankind much more as a task to be achieved than as an accomplished or given fact to be enjoyed. Nietzsche says somewhere, 'if the goal of humanity be wanting, do we not lack humanity itself?' We look for the ultimate unity of mankind in the pursuit of a common end. The search for such a goal, and the effort to achieve it, lend worth to history and to present action.
This faith, often blind and unreasoned, is distinctly Western and modern. We do not derive it even from Greece. It comes to us through Christianity and modern science. The absence of any such faith in activity and progress creates the pessimism of the East. Hinduism and Buddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side. The majestic religious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless and meaningless repetition. Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if I mistake not. As Eucken says, 'Ancient views of life bore throughout an unhistorical character. The numerous philosophical doctrines of the procession of endless similar cycles, which continually return to the starting-point, were only the expression of the conviction that all movement at bottom brings nothing new and that life offers no prospect of further improvement.' When Paul discovered that the law was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, he enunciated a profounder philosophy of history than Plato ever knew.
The very fact that Christianity sprang out of Judaism means that it enshrines and suggests the idea of progress in the very circumstances of its origin. But its hold on the idea is something deeper than its connexion with Judaism. Christianity claims to be the final religion, but its claim differs in kind from the parallel claim of Mohammedanism. The world of Islam is held in mortmain by the prophet. It cannot advance beyond the forms in which he embodied his message without denying the claims he made for himself. But to the early Christians the synoptic gospels were the record of all that Jesus began to do and to say, while the highest development of Christian experience and reflection in the New Testament, the gospel of John, contemplates the greater things which the followers of Jesus shall accomplish and the fuller revelations which shall come as the disciples are able to bear them. The claim of Christianity to finality rests on its opening up endless possibilities of spiritual growth to mankind. To some of us it seems that part of this fuller revelation has come through modern knowledge and discovery. The faith in progress which Christians have often held falteringly and have sometimes denied, appears to be confirmed and clarified by all that we are learning of creative evolution. In any case, the influence of modern science has tended to produce a faith in progress in the West—a faith which some regard as essentially different from the Christian view of the world and history, but which for others seems more and more to coalesce with that earlier if in some respects cruder Christian conviction. No doubt when the facts of evolution were held to point to gradual and continuous development, they favoured a view of steady progress which was antagonistic to the Christian belief in the sudden introduction of new elements into history. But the later advances of evolutionary theory seem more akin to the early Christian attitude. The element of apocalyptic is seen not to be so alien from nature as had been at first supposed.
However it arises and whatever form it takes, this faith in progress is characteristic of the Western outlook, and gives a positive answer to the question, Is life worth living? That such a faith is strange to India may be evidenced by the reception accorded to the poet Tagore in India itself. Mr. Yeats gives us the judgement of a Bengali who said of Tagore, 'He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' Now Tagore's genius is thoroughly Indian, but his originality in this respect is due directly or indirectly to contact with the influence of the West. It is our belief in action and in the worth of human achievement which is voiced in his poems and in his philosophy, and the note is new in India.
Illustrations of this belief in progress and activity are superfluous, though I may remind you of the prevalence of this temper in the realm of philosophy as well as of religion at the present time. Perhaps it is worth recalling that Harnack's great history of dogma ends with this significant sentence from Zwingli: 'It is not the part of a Christian man to be for ever talking grandly about dogma, but always to be attempting big things in fellowship with God.' This represents as well as anything our Western insistence on the worth of effort. As an admirable embodiment at once of the faith in humanity and the faith in progress, the close of Matthew Arnold's poem 'Rugby Chapel' recurs to the mind. You remember how he conceives the function of great men to lie in preserving the union of mankind, and how he conceives the life of mankind as a journey towards a city that hath foundations.
These two characteristics, faith in the oneness of mankind and in the reality of progress, do add a sense of common aspiration to the civilization of the West. But of themselves they do not create a very close unity. Men may believe in human solidarity and in the worth of effort, and yet be following divergent ideals and divisive enthusiasms. These beliefs are surrounded by haze and indefiniteness. In themselves they scarcely constitute a religion that will satisfy, much less one that can effectively unite us. However fully we share them, they will not enable us to meet and surmount the present crisis. So far as I can judge, these vaguer beliefs in humanity and progress are largely the deposit of Christian faith, and to be rendered effective they need to be ever reconnected with the central elements in that faith; in particular, with the Christian judgement on sin and with the Christian devotion to the historic Jesus.
The sense of sin has received a peculiar impress in the West. We owe it largely to the religious experience of the Jew and to the seriousness of the Latin mind. There is a curious coincidence of the seventh chapter of Romans with a famous quotation from Ovid. The Latin fathers, particularly Augustine, have developed, not to say over-developed, the analysis of sin. The concept of sin never had the same significance for the Greek, and humanism has always resented the severity of the tradition that comes from Paul through Augustine and Calvin. Mr. Holmes's stimulating books on education are inspired by a theological polemic against the doctrine of original sin. He not unnaturally takes refuge in Buddhism, for Buddhism makes suffering, not sin, the root trouble of human life. 'The division between the will and the power, the struggle of the senses against our better judgement, the falling below the moral ideal—none of all this comes within the horizon of Buddha.' Now it may freely be confessed that the Calvinist view of sin led to a distrust of human nature, and incidentally of child-nature, which had a not altogether healthy reaction on home discipline and school-life. It is very difficult to maintain the right balance, and the danger of morbidity through emphasis on sin is undeniable. Yet it seems to me that the worst errors of Calvinism and Evangelicalism in this regard have lain in a tendency to theological formalism and a failure to keep in touch with real life. In consequence, those who most deplore our waning sense of sin try us by a perverted or antiquated standard, and fasten often on changes of sentiment and habit which are by no means necessarily or largely sinful. They are least conscious of the want of a sense of sin, in modern society, where that want is most serious. But I do not doubt that our often old-fashioned friends are right on the main issue. I do not believe that we shall see the progress we desire, unless we recover a heightened sense of sin. I hold with Lord Acton that our internal conflicts are due to indifference to sin and not to a religious idea. We judge ourselves and our race too lightly. We quench our hope of progress by a leniency and indulgence towards our failings which involve an underestimate of our powers and responsibilities. The present crisis will not issue in a hopeful reaction through regret but only through repentance.
The sense of sin which Christianity has brought to the West is not, I think, to be found elsewhere. It only appears where men feel they have an assured knowledge of God's will. It is intense only where men are conscious of God's presence. The vision of the Holiest reveals to Isaiah that he is a man of unclean lips. Such a conviction of sin seems to me inexplicable apart from contact with the living God. Two things are required to bring home to men a true estimate of their moral failure, first a right standard of judgement, and, second, a conviction of the reality of God. Is it too much to say that we are not likely to reach either, apart from Jesus of Nazareth? 'It is through Jesus and not from Adam that we know sin.' It is through Him that men discover their moral ideal and learn not simply to believe that there is a God, but to say, O God, Thou art my God even for ever and ever.