There has, it is plain, been something fundamentally wrong with European civilisation, and the disease appears to be a moral one. With this conviction it is natural that men should turn upon the official custodians of religion and morality, and ask them whether they have been unfaithful to their trust, or whether it is not rather proved that the faith which they profess is itself bankrupt and incapable of exerting any salutary influence upon human character and action. Christianity stands arraigned at the bar of public opinion. But it is not without significance that the indictment should now be urged with a vehemence which we do not find in the records of former convulsions. It was not generally felt to be a scandal to Christianity that England was at war for 69 years out of the 120 which preceded the battle of Waterloo. Either our generation expected more from Christianity, or it was far more shocked by the sudden outbreak of this fierce war than our ancestors were by the almost chronic condition of desultory campaigning to which they were accustomed. The latter is probably the true reason. The belief in progress, which at the beginning of the industrial revolution was an article of faith, had become a tacitly accepted presupposition of all serious thought; and even those who were dubious about the moral improvement of mankind in other directions, seldom denied that we were more humane and peaceable than our forefathers. The disillusion has struck our self-complacency in its most vital spot. Nothing in our own experience had prepared us for the hideous savagery and vandalism of German warfare, the first accounts of which we received with blank amazement and incredulity. Then, when disbelief was no longer possible, there awoke within us a sense of fear for our homes and women and children—feeling to which modern civilised man had long been a stranger. We had not supposed that the non-combatant population of any European country would ever again be exposed to the horrors of savage warfare. This, much more than the war itself, has made thousands feel that the house of civilisation is built upon the sand, and that Christianity has failed to subdue the most barbarous instincts of human nature. Christians cannot regret that the flagrant contradiction between the principles of their creed and the scenes that have been enacted during the last three years is fully recognised. But the often repeated statement that 'Christianity has failed' needs more examination than it usually receives from those who utter it.
History acquaints us with two kinds of religion, which, though they are not entirely separate from each other, differ very widely in their effects upon conduct and morality. The religio which Lucretius hated, and from which he strangely hoped that the atomistic materialism of Epicurus had finally delivered mankind, has its roots in the sombre and confused superstitions of the savage. Fear, as Statius and Petronius tell us, created the gods of this religion. These deities are mysterious and capricious powers, who exact vengeance for the transgression of arbitrary laws which they have not revealed, and who must be propitiated by public sacrifice, lest some collective punishment fall on the tribe, blighting its crops and smiting its herds with murrain, or giving it over into the hand of its enemies. This religion makes very little attempt to correct the current standard of values. Its rewards are wealth and prosperity; its punishments are calamity in this world and perhaps torture in the next. It is not, however, incapable of moralisation. The wrath of heaven may visit not the innocent violation of some tabu, but cruelty and injustice. In the historical books of the Old Testament, though Uzzah is stricken dead for touching the ark, and the subjects of King David afflicted with pestilence because their ruler took a census of his people, Jehovah is above all things a righteous God, who punishes bloodshed, adultery, and social oppression. So in Greece the Furies pursue the homicide and the perjurer, till the name of his family is clean put out. Herodotus tells us how the family of Glaucus was extinguished because he consulted the oracle of Delphi about an act of embezzlement which he was meditating.
International law was protected by the same fear of divine vengeance. The murder of heralds must by all means be expiated. When the Romans repudiate their 'scrap of paper' with the Samnites, they deliver up to the enemy the officers who signed it, though (with characteristic 'slimness') not the army which the mountaineers had captured and liberated under the agreement. To destroy the temples in an enemy's country was an act of wanton impiety; Herodotus cannot understand the religious intolerance which led the Persians to burn the shrines of Greek gods. Thus religion had a restraining influence in war throughout antiquity, and in the Middle Ages. The Pope, who was believed to hold the keys of future bliss and torment, was frequently, though by no means always, obeyed by the turbulent feudal lords, and often enforced the sanctity of a contract by the threat or the imposition of excommunication and interdict. In order to make these penalties more terrible, the torments of those who died under the displeasure of the Church were painted in the most vivid colours. But in the official and popular Christian eschatology, as in the terrestrial theodicy of the Old Testament, there is little or no moral idealism. The joys or pains of the future life are made to depend, in part at least, on the observance or violation of the moral law, but they are themselves of a kind which the natural man would desire or dread. They are an enhanced, because a deferred, retribution of the same kind which in more primitive religions promises earthly prosperity to the righteous, and earthly calamities to the wicked. Values, positive and negative, are taken nearly as they stand in the estimation of the average man.
But there is another religious tradition, which in Greece was almost separated from the official and national cults, and among the Hebrews was often in opposition to them. The Hebrew prophets certainly proclaimed that 'the history of the world is the judgment of the world,' and often assumed, too crudely as it seems to us, that national calamities are a proof of national transgression; but the whole course of development in prophecy was towards an autonomous morality based on a spiritual valuation of life. Its quarrel with sacerdotalism was mainly directed against the unethical tabu-morality of the priesthood; the revolt was grounded in a lofty moral idealism, which found expression in a half-symbolic vision of a coming state in which might and right should coincide. The apocalyptic prophecies of post-exilic Judaism, which were not based, like some political predictions of the earlier prophets, on a statesmanlike view of the international situation, but on hopes of supernatural intervention, had their roots in visions of a new and better world-order. This aspiration, which had to disentangle itself by degrees from the patriotic dreams of a stubborn and unfortunate race, was projected into the near future, and was mixed with less worthy political ambitions which had a different origin. The prophet always foreshortens his revelation, and generally blends the city of God with a vision of his own country transfigured. We see him doing this even to-day, in his Utopian dreams of social reconstruction.
And so it has always been. We remember Condorcet foretelling a reign of truth and peace just before he was compelled to flee from the storm of calumny to die in a damp cell at Bourg la Reine; and Kant hailing the approach of a peaceful international republic while Napoleon was preparing to drown Europe in blood. Apocalyptism is a compromise between the religion of rewards and punishments and the religion of spiritual deliverance. It calls a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old; but its discontent with the old is mainly the result of a moral and spiritual valuation of life. Greek philosophy has really much in common with Hebrew prophecy, though the Greek envisaged his ideal world as the eternal background of reality, and not under the form of history. In its maturest form, it is a transvaluation of all values in accordance with an absolute ideal standard—that of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This idealism appears in a still more drastic form in the religions of Asia, which preach deliverance by demonetising at a stroke all the world's currency. Spiritual values are alone accepted; man wins peace and freedom by renouncing in advance all of which fortune may deprive him.
We are apt to assume, in deference to our theories of human progress, that the evolution of religion is normally from a lower to a higher type. It would, indeed, be absurd to question that the religion of a civilised people is usually more spiritual and more rational than that of barbarians. But none the less, the history of religions is generally a history of decline. In Judaism the prophets came before the Scribes and the Pharisees. Brahmanism and Buddhism were both degraded by superstitions and unethical rites. Christianity, which began as a republication of the purest prophetic teaching, has suffered the same fate. In each case, when the revelation has lost its freshness, and the enthusiasm which it evoked has begun to cool, a reversion to older habits of thought and customs takes place; and sometimes it may be said that the old religion has really conquered the new.
Christianity, as taught by its Founder, is based on a transvaluation of values even more complete than that of Stoicism and the later Platonism, because, while it regards the objects of ordinary ambition as a positive hindrance to the higher life, it accepts and gives value to those pains of sympathy which Greek thought dreaded, as detracting from the calm enjoyment of the philosophic life. This acceptance of the world's suffering, from which every other spiritual religion and philosophy promise a way of escape, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Christian ethics. In practice, it thus achieves a more complete conquest of evil than any other system; and by bringing sorrow and sympathy into the Divine life, it not only presents the character and nature of the Deity in a new light, but opens out a new ideal of moral perfection. This is not the place for a discussion of the main characteristics of the Gospel of Christ, and they are familiar to us all. But, since we are now considering the charge of failure brought against Christianity in connexion with the present world-war, it seems necessary to emphasise two points which are not always remembered.
The first is that there is no evidence that the historical Christ ever intended to found a new institutional religion. He neither attempted to make a schism in the Jewish Church nor to substitute a new system for it. He placed Himself deliberately in the prophetic line, only claiming to sum up the series in Himself. The whole manner of His life and teaching was prophetic. The differences which undoubtedly may be found between His style and that of the older prophets do not remove Him from the company in which He clearly wished to stand. He treated the institutional religion of His people with the independence and indifference of the prophet and mystic; and the hierarchy, which, like other hierarchies, had a sure instinct in discerning a dangerous enemy, was not slow to declare war to the knife against Him. Such, He reminded His enemies, was the treatment which all the prophets had met with from the class to which those enemies belonged. This, then, is the first fact to remember. Institutional Christianity may be a legitimate and necessary historical development from the original Gospel, but it is something alien to the Gospel itself. The first disciples believed that they had the Master's authority for expecting the end of the existing world-order in their own lifetime. They believed that He had come forward with the cry of 'Hora novissima!' Whether they misunderstood Him or not, they clearly could not have held this opinion if they had received instructions for the constitution of a Church.
The second point on which it is necessary to insist is that Christ never expected, or taught His disciples to expect, that His teaching would meet with wide acceptance, or exercise political influence. 'The world'—organised human society—was the enemy and was to continue the enemy. His message, He foresaw, would be scorned and rejected by the majority; and those who preached it were to expect persecution. This warning is repeated so often in the Gospels that it would be superfluous to give quotations. He made it quite plain that the big battalions are never likely to be gathered before the narrow gate. He declared that only false prophets are well spoken of by the majority. When we consider the revolutionary character of the Christian idealism, its indifference to nearly all that passes for 'religion' with the vulgar, and its reversal of all current valuations, it is plain that it is never likely to be a popular creed. As surely as the presence of high spiritual instincts in the human mind guarantees its indestructibility, so surely the deeply-rooted prejudices which keep the majority on a lower level must prevent the Gospel of Christ from dominating mundane politics or social life.
Moreover, the actual extent of its influence cannot be estimated. The inwardness and individualism of its teaching make its apparent effectiveness smaller than its real power, which works secretly and unobserved. The vices which Christ regarded with abhorrence are perversions of character—hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, and worldliness or secularity; and who can say what degree of success the Gospel has achieved in combating these? The method of Christianity is alien to all externalism and machinery; it does not lend itself to those accommodations and compromises without which nothing can be done in politics. As Harnack says, the Gospel is not one of social improvement, but of spiritual redemption. Its influence upon social and political life is indirect and obscure, operating through a subtle modification of current valuations, and curbing the competitive and acquisitive instincts, which nearly correspond with what Christ called 'Mammon' and St. Paul 'the flesh.' Christianity is a spiritual dynamic, which has very little to do directly with the mechanism of social life.