The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their formalists and traditionalists. If there is any church that refuses so to adapt itself, the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it without followers. But in the great religions, which have a soul of goodness and sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise, prophets and saints who, as of old, will preach the living word of God. In many churches today we can see the beginning of that new Counter-Reformation. Even in the Catholic Church there is a "modernist" rebellion; read the books of the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's trilogy of novels, "The Saint", and you will see a genuine and vital protest against the economic corruption of the Church. In America, the "Knights of Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a "War for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y. M. C. A. in the training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.
This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation Army. William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the lost souls of the slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he persisted, and brought his captives to Jesus—
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.
Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population. He had not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So the Salvation army was forced into useful work—old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas dinners, farm colonies—until today the bare list of the various kinds of enterprises it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done with the money of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to authority, but no one can deny that it is better than "Gibson's Preservative", and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with port.
And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater. Here and there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job and preaching the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are making attempts at "missions" and "settlements" in the slums. The more vital churches are gradually turning themselves into societies for the practical betterment of their members. Their clergy are running boys clubs and sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for mothers, social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always before the clergyman's face—that with prayer-meetings and psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and educational societies and social reforms he thrives.
And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches, like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of this—any more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary thought can see the main outlines of the future. We see that in these new church activities the clergy are inspired by things read, not in ancient Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers. They are responding to the actual, instant needs of their boys in the trenches and the camps; and this is bound to have an effect upon their psychology. Just as we can say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her old life, and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in its debates, will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say that the clergyman who helps in Y. M. C. A. work in France, or in Red Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to adjust means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and social solidarity by the method which modern educators most favor—by doing. Also he will have absorbed a mass of ideas in news despatches from over the world. He is forced to read these despatches carefully, because the fate of his own boys is involved; and we Socialists will see to it that the despatches are well filled with propaganda!
The Desire of Nations
So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the Church which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and say that we think about nothing but the belly—and that is true, in a way; because we are the representatives of a starving class, which thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is ravening with hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James, the brother of Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the body," and then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have souls; whereas at present we are led to despise the very word "spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and poseurs.
We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to us. We would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if there were in the world institutions conducted by men and women of consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true morality to the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not of slavery; a morality founded upon reason, not upon superstition. The men who teach it must be men who know what truth is, and the passionate loyalty which the search for truth inspires. They cannot be the pitiful shufflers and compromisers we see in the churches today, the Jowetts who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Rather than trust our children to such shameless cynics, we will make shift to train them ourselves—we amateurs, not knowing much about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against organized wrong.