On this side of its life therefore, the Church came very near to being a vast Guild where with the highest sanction rights and duties were intermingled in due proportion, and that true social unity established, which while it refuses privileges bestows protection. On these foundations the organisation was reared, which like some great Cathedral dominated that stretch of centuries usually known as the Middle Ages. We could all of us hold forth on its drawbacks and evils, yet its benefits were tremendous. For one thing it created an aristocracy wholly independent of any distinction of blood or property. Anyone might become an Archbishop if only he had the necessary gifts. Still more anyone might become a Saint. The charmed circle of the Church's nobility was constantly recruited from every class, and was therefore a standing and effectual protest against the flimsier measurements of Society and the more ephemeral gradations of rank. Obviously this process found as great a scope in England as elsewhere. It was the Church which was the most potent instrument in bringing together Norman and Saxon as well as master and slave. For, as Macaulay has said with perfect truth, it
creates an aristocracy altogether independent of race, inverts the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, and compels the hereditary master to kneel before the spiritual tribunal of the hereditary bondman.... So successfully had the Church used her formidable machinery that, before the Reformation came, she had enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom except her own, who, to do her justice, seem to have been very tenderly treated[29].
This makes it particularly deplorable that in consequence of the great reaction in religion from the corporate to the personal, to which I have alluded, the Church's power, as far as Britain was concerned, though so splendidly exercised in the preceding centuries, should have been almost non-existent just at the moment when it was most required, in the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution of comparatively modern times.
III
THE HOPE OF THE PRESENT SITUATION
I fear that a large portion of this lecture has been taken up with the past. But even so rough and brief a review as I have attempted is a necessary prelude to a just estimate, both of our present position and of our future prospects. It is often supposed, indeed, that the study of history predisposes a man's mind to a conservative view. He studies the slow development of institutions, or the gradual influence of movements, and the trend of his thought works round to the very antipodes of anything that is revolutionary or catastrophic. But there is another side to the matter. The study of history may so expose the injustices of the past and their intrenchments that the student reaches the conclusion that nothing but an earthquake—an earthquake in men's ideas at the very least—can avail to set things right; that the best thing that could happen would be an explosion so terrible as to make it possible to break completely with the past, and start anew on firmer principles and better ways. After all, as a great Cambridge scholar once said, "History is the best cordial for drooping spirits." For if on the one hand it exposes the selfishnesses of men, on the other it displays an exhibition of those Divine-human forces of justice and sacrifice and good will which in the long run cannot be denied, and which encourage the brightest hopes for the age which is upon us.
The fact is, we are in the midst of precisely such an explosion as I have indicated. The immeasurable privilege has been given to us of being alive at a time when, most literally, an epoch is being made. Contemporary observers of events are not always the best judges of their significance, yet we shall hardly be mistaken if we assert that without doubt we stand at one of the turning points of the world's long story, that the phrase used of another epoch-making moment is true of this one, "Old things are passing away, all things are becoming new." For history is presenting us in these days with a clean slate, and to the men of this generation is given the opportunity for making a fresh start such as in the centuries gone by has often been sought, but seldom found. We are called to the serious and strenuous task of freeing our minds from old preconceptions—and the hold they have over us, even at a moment like this when the world is being shaken, is amazing—the task of reaching a new point of view from which to see our social problems, and of not being disobedient to the heavenly vision wheresoever it may lead us.
That vision is Fellowship, and it is not new. Though the war is, in the sense which I have suggested, a terrific explosion which in the midst of ruin and chaos brings with it supreme opportunities, it is equally true to say that it forms no more than a ghastly parenthesis in the process of fellowship both between nations and classes which had already begun to make great strides.
"The sense of social responsibility has been so deepened in our civilisation that it is almost impossible that one nation should attempt to conquer and subdue another after the manner of the ancient world."
These words sound rather ironical. They come from the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They were written about seven years ago in perfect good faith, as a sober estimate of the forces of fellowship which could be then discerned. Save for the ideals and ambitions of the central Empires of Europe they were perfectly true. What the war has done in regard to this fellowship is to expose in their hideous nakedness the dangers which threaten it, and to which in pre-war days we were far too blind, but also to unveil that strong passion for neighbourliness which lies deep in the hearts of men, and an almost fierce determination to give it truer expression in the age which is ahead.