UC-NRLF 
 
 $B i43=] flb? 
 

 ^7x \yfurr&e' ^&Afi&ri<4 
 
 Ctriwcrjs'/y' *J jrja/t/ortua' 
 
<*jpfc c^CC, /<^~ <*( ' 'ck^L /Cc 
 
 1 iftc.;"- Z^y y^' t^^ 
 
 
THIS IS THE PREACHMENT*** 
 ON GOING TO CHURCH*WRIT 
 BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 
 AND DONE INTO PRINT AT THE 
 ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP A 
 WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, 
 NEW YORK, U. S. A. 
 
 MDCCCXCVI 
 
WCNRY MORSE STBTHCH* 
 

 Copyright 1896 
 
 by 
 
 The Roycroft Printing Shop 
 
 511245 
 
On Going To Church. 
 
 J 
 
 I 
 
 O ME, as a modern 
 man, concerned with 
 matters of fine art and 
 living in London by the 
 sweat of my brain, 'tis 
 a grim fact that I dwell 
 in a world which, unable to live by 
 bread alone, lives spiritually on alco- 
 hol and morphia $$ Young and ex- 
 cessively sentimental city people live 
 on love, and delight in poetry or fine 
 writing which declares that love is 
 Alpha and Omega. But an attentive 
 examination will generally establish 
 the fact that this kind of love, ethe- 
 real as it seems, is merely a symp- 
 tom of the drugs I have mentioned, 
 and does not occur independently ex- 
 cept in those persons whose normal 
 state is similar to that induced in 
 / healthy persons by narcotic stimu- 
 lants dips If from the fine art of to-day 
 we set aside feelingless or prosaic 
 
 i 
 
A 
 
 ONGOING 
 
 art, which is, properly, not fine art at 
 all, we may safely refer most of the 
 rest to feeling produced by the teapot, 
 the bottle, or the hypodermic syr- 
 inge fjgb 
 
 An exhibition of the cleverest men 
 and women in London at five p. m., 
 with their afternoon tea cut off, would 
 shatter many illusions. Tea and cof- 
 fee and cigarettes produce conversa- 
 tion ; lager beer and pipes produce 
 routine journalism ; wine and gal- 
 antry produce brilliant journalism, 
 essays and novels ; brandy and cigars 
 produce violently devotional or erotic 
 poetry ; morphia produces tragic ex- 
 altation (useful on the stage); and so- 
 briety produces an average curate's 
 sermon. 
 
 GAIN, strychnine and ar- 
 senic may be taken as pick- 
 me-ups ; doctors quite un- 
 derstand that " tonics' ' 
 mean drams of ether ; chlorodyne is a 
 universal medicine ; chloral, sulphon- 
 al and the like call up Nature's great 
 2 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 destroyer, artificial sleep ; bromide of 
 potassium will reduce the over-sensi- 
 tive man of genius to a condition in 
 which the alighting of a wasp on his 
 naked eyeball will not make him 
 wink ; hasheesh tempts the dreamer 
 by the Oriental glamour of its reputa- 
 tion ; and gin is a cheap substitute 
 for all these anodynes ^j Most of the 
 activity of the Press, the Pulpit, the 
 Platform and the Theatre is only a 
 sympton of the activity of the drug 
 trade, the tea trade, the tobacco trade 
 and the liquor trade. The world is not 
 going from bad to worse, it is true ; 
 but the increased facilities which con- 
 stitute the advance of civilization in- 
 clude facilities for drugging one's self. 
 These facilities wipe whole races of 
 black men off the face of the earth ; 
 and every extension and refinement 
 of them picks a stratum out of white 
 society and devotes it to destruction. 
 Such traditions of the gross old habits 
 as have reached me seem to be based 
 on the idea of first doing your day's 
 
 3 
 
ON GOING 
 
 work and then enjoying yourself by 
 getting drunk S Nowadays you get 
 drunk to enable you to begin work. 
 
 HAKESPERE'S oppor- 
 tunities of meddling with 
 ^SJ^SjlJjhis nerves were much 
 K*s5$v3more limited than Dante 
 
 Rossetti's ; but it is not clear that the 
 advantages of the change lay with 
 Rossetti. Besides, though Shakespere 
 may, as tradition asserts, have died 
 of drink in a ditch, he at all events 
 conceived alcohol as an enemy put by 
 a man into his own mouth to steal 
 away his brains ; whereas the mod- 
 ern man conceives it as an indispen- 
 sable means of setting his brains go- 
 ing. We drink and drug, not for the 
 pleasure of it, but for Dutch inspira- 
 tion and by the advice of our doctors, 
 as duelists drink for Dutch courage 
 by the advice of their seconds % Ob- 
 viously this systematic, utilitarian 
 drugging and stimulating, though nec- 
 essarily "moderate" (so as not to 
 defeat its own object), is more dan- 
 4 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 gerous than the old boozing if we are 
 to regard the use of stimulants as an 
 evil. 
 
 S for me, I do not clearly 
 X see where a scientific line 
 can be drawn between food 
 and stimulants. I cannot 
 say, like Ninon de l'Enclos, that a 
 bowl of soup intoxicates me ; but it 
 stimulates me as much as I want to 
 be stimulated, which is, perhaps, all 
 that Ninon meant. Still, I have not 
 failed to observe that all the drugs, 
 from tea to morphia, and all the 
 drams, from lager beer to brandy, dull 
 the edge of self-criticism and make a 
 man content with something less than 
 the best work of which he is soberly 
 capable $& He thinks his work better, 
 when he is really only more easily 
 satisfied with himself. Those whose 
 daily task is only a routine, for the 
 sufficient discharge of which a man 
 need hardly be more than half alive, 
 may seek this fool's paradise without 
 detriment to their work ; but to those 
 
 5 
 
ON GOING 
 
 professional men whose art affords 
 practically boundless scope for skill of 
 execution and elevation of thought, to 
 take drug or dram is to sacrifice the 
 keenest, most precious part of life to 
 a dollop of lazy and vulgar comfort 
 for which no true man of genius 
 should have any greater stomach than 
 the lady of the manor has for her 
 ploughman's lump of fat bacon. 
 
 SOR the creative artist stim- 
 ulants are especially dan- 
 gerous, since they produce 
 that terrible dream-glamour 
 in which the ugly, the grotesque, the 
 wicked, the morbific begin to fasci- 
 nate and obsess instead of disgusting. 
 This effect, however faint it may be, 
 is always produced in some degree by 
 drugs. The mark left on a novel in the 
 " Leisure Hour " by a cup of tea may 
 be imperceptible to a bishop's wife 
 who has just had two cups ; but the 
 effect is there as certainly as if De 
 Quincey's eight thousand drops of 
 laudanum had been substituted. 
 6 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 II 
 
 Y a very little experi- 
 
 mm 
 
 Srj^Aj^ letters will convince any 
 22^=^jopen-minded person that 
 abstinence, pure and simple, is not a 
 practicable remedy for this state of 
 things. There is a considerable com- 
 mercial demand for maudlin or night- 
 marish art and literature which no 
 sober person would produce, the man- 
 ufacture of which must accordingly 
 be frankly classed industrially with 
 the unhealthy trades, and morally 
 with the manufacture of unwholesome 
 sweets for children or the distilling of 
 gin. What the victims of this industry 
 call imagination and artistic faculty is 
 nothing but attenuated delirium tre- 
 mens, like Pasteur's attenuated hy- 
 drophobia. It is useless to encumber 
 an argument with these predestined 
 children of perdition. The only profit- 
 able cases are those to consider of 
 people engaged in the healthy pursuit 
 
 7 
 
ON GOING 
 
 of those arts which afford scope for 
 the greatest mental and physical en- 
 ergy, the clearest and acutest reason 
 and the most elevated perception. 
 Work of this kind requires an intensi- 
 ty of energy of which no ordinary la- 
 bourer or routine official can form any 
 conception. If the dreams of Keeley- 
 ism could be so far realized as to 
 transmute human brain energy into 
 vulgar explosive force, the- head of 
 Shakespere, used as a bombshell, 
 might conceivably blow England out 
 of the sea. At all events, the succes- 
 sion of efforts by which a Shaksperean 
 play, a Beethoven symphony, or a 
 Wagner music-drama is produced, 
 though it may not overtax Shakespere, 
 Beethoven or Wagner, must certainly 
 tax even them to the utmost, and 
 would be as prodigiously impossible 
 to the average professional man as 
 the writing of an ordinary leading ar- 
 ticle to a ploughman. 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 >H AT is called profession- 
 al work is, in point of se- 
 rverity, just what you 
 choose to make it; either 
 commonplace, easy and requiring only 
 extensive industry to be lucrative, or 
 else distinguished, difficult and exact- 
 ing the fiercest intensive industry in 
 return, after a probation of twenty 
 years or so, for authority, reputation 
 and an income only sufficient for sim- 
 ple habits and plain living. The whole 
 professional world lies between these 
 two extremes. At the one, you have 
 the man to whom his profession is 
 only a means of making himself and 
 his family comfortable and prosper- 
 ous : at the other, you have the man 
 who sacrifices everything and every- 
 body, himself included, to the perfec- 
 tion of his work to the passion for 
 efficiency which is the true master- 
 passion of the artist *^S At the one, 
 work is a necessary evil and money- 
 making a pleasure ; at the other, work 
 is the objective realization of life and 
 
 9 
 
ON GOING 
 
 moneymaking a nuisance. At the one, 
 men drink and drug to make them- 
 selves comfortable ; at the other, to 
 stimulate their working faculty (gb 
 Preach mere abstinence to the one, 
 and you are preaching nothing but 
 diminution of happiness. Preach it to 
 the other, and you are proposing a re- 
 duction of efficiency if If you are to 
 prevail, you must propose a substi- 
 tute. And the only one I have yet been 
 able to hit on is going to church. 
 
 in 
 
 kw^JT will not be disputed, I pre- 
 *^ sume, that an unstimulated $ 
 L saint can work as hard, as long, 
 frj I &l as fi ne ty anc *> on occasion, as 
 QK\ fiercely, as a stimulated sinner. 
 aSRecuperation, recreation, in- 
 spiration seem to come to the saint 
 far more surely than to the man who 
 grows coarser and fatter with every 
 additional hundred a year, and who 
 calls the saint an ascetic. A compar- 
 ison of the works of our carnivorous 
 10 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 drunkard poets with those of Shelley, 
 or of Dr. Johnson's dictionary with 
 that of the vegetarian Littre, is suffi- 
 cient to show that the secret of attain- 
 ing the highest eminence either in 
 poetry or in dictionary compiling (and 
 all fine literature lies between the 
 two), is to be found neither in alcohol 
 nor in our monstrous habit of bring- 
 ing millions of useless and disagree- 
 able animals into existence for the ex- 
 press purpose of barbarously slaugh- 
 tering them, roasting, their corpses 
 and eating them. I have myself tried 
 the experiment of not eating meat or 
 drinking tea, coffee or spirits for more 
 than a dozen years past, without, as 
 far as I can discover, placing myself 
 at more than my natural disadvan- 
 tages relatively to those colleagues of 
 mine who patronize the slaughter- 
 house and the distillery. 
 
 JUT then I go to church. If 
 lyou should chance to see, in 
 ]a country church-yard, a bi- 
 Jcycle leaning against a tomb- 
 
 ii 
 
ON GOING 
 
 stone, you are not unlikely to find me 
 inside the church if it is old enough 
 or new enough to be fit for its pur- 
 pose. There I find rest without lan- 
 guor and recreation without excite- 
 ment, both of a quality unknown to 
 the traveller who turns from the vil- 
 lage church to the village inn and 
 -^ seeks to renew himself with shandy- 
 gaff. Any place where men dwell, vil- 
 lage or city, is a reflection of the con- 
 sciousness of every single man. In 
 my consciousness there is a market, 
 a garden, a dwelling, a workshop, a 
 lover's walk above all, a cathedral. 
 >ESjj3SZ2Y appeal to the master- 
 
 uw I s^(4Bl^ u ^^ er * s : Mirror this ca- 
 Iv 1 t^Wthedral for me in enduring 
 ' & - m jp^ jstone ; make it with hands ; 
 
 let it direct its sure and clear appeal 
 to my senses, so that when my spirit 
 is vaguely groping after an elusive 
 mood my eye shall be caught by the 
 skyward tower, showing me where, 
 within the cathedral, I may find my 
 way to the cathedral within me. With 
 12 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 a right knowledge of this great func- 
 tion of the cathedral builder, and craft 
 enough to set an arch on a couple of 
 pillars, make doors and windows in a 
 good wall and put a roof over them, 
 any modern man might, it seems to 
 me, build churches as they built them 
 in the middle ages, if only the pious 
 founders and the parson would let 
 him 
 
 For want of that knowledge, gentle- 
 men of Mr. Pecksniff's profession 
 make fashionable pencil drawings, 
 presenting what Mr. Pecksniffs cre- 
 ator elsewhere calls an architectoor- 
 alooral appearance, with which, hav- 
 ing delighted the darkened eyes of the 
 committee and the clerics, they have 
 them translated into bricks and ma- 
 sonry and take a shilling in the pound 
 on the bill, with the result that the 
 bishop may consecrate the finished 
 building until he is black in the face 
 without making a real church of it. 
 Can it be doubted by the pious that 
 babies baptized in such places go to 
 
 13 
 
ON GOING 
 
 limbo if they die before qualifying 
 themselves for other regions; that 
 prayers said there do not count ; nay, 
 that such purposeless, respectable- 
 looking interiors are irreconcilable 
 with the doctrine of Omnipresence, 
 since the bishop's blessing is no spell 
 of black magic to imprison Omnipo- 
 tence in a place that must needs be 
 intolerable to Omniscience ? 
 
 T all events, the godhead 
 in me, certified by the 
 tenth chapter of St. John's 
 Gospel to those who will 
 admit no other authority, refuses to 
 enter these barren places. This is per- 
 haps fortunate, since they are gener- 
 ally kept locked ; and even when they 
 are open, they are jealously guarded 
 in the spirit of that Westminster Ab- 
 bey verger who, not long ago, had a 
 stranger arrested for kneeling down, 
 and explained, when remonstrated 
 with, that if that sort of thing were 
 tolerated, they would soon have peo- 
 ple praying all over the place. Happi- 
 14 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 ly, it is not so everywhere. You may 
 now ride or tramp into a village with 
 a fair chance of finding the church- 
 door open and a manuscript placard 
 in the porch, whereby the parson, 
 speaking no less as a man and a 
 brother than as the porter of the House 
 Beautiful, gives you to understand 
 that the church is open always for 
 those who have any use for it. 
 
 'NSIDE such churches you 
 will often find not only care- 
 fully cherished work from 
 the ages of faith, which you 
 expect to find noble and lovely, but 
 sometimes a quite modern furnishing 
 of the interior and draping of the altar, 
 evidently done, not by contract with 
 a firm celebrated for its illustrated 
 catalogues, but by some one who 
 loved and understood the church, and 
 who, when baffled in the search for 
 beautiful things, had at least suc- 
 ceeded in avoiding indecently com- 
 mercial and incongruous ones. And 
 then the search for beauty is not al- 
 
 15 
 
ON GOING 
 
 ways baffled if When the dean and 
 chapter of a cathedral want not mere- 
 ly an ugly but a positively beastly pul- 
 pit to preach from something like 
 the Albert Memorial canopy, only 
 much worse they always get it, im- 
 probable and unnatural as the enter- 
 prise is. Similarly, when an enlight- 
 ened country parson wants an unpre- 
 tending tub to thump, with a few 
 pretty panels in it and a pleasant 
 shape generally, he will, with a little 
 perseverance, soon enough find a 
 craftsman who has picked up the 
 thread of the tradition of his craft from 
 the time when that craft was a fine 
 art as may be done nowadays more 
 easily than was possible before we 
 had cheap trips and cheap photo- 
 graphs and who is only too glad to 
 be allowed to try his hand at some- 
 thing in the line of that tradition. 
 
 months ago, I came upon a 
 
 little church, built long be- 
 
 g fore the sense of beauty and 
 
 16 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 devotion had been supplanted by the 
 sense of respectability and talent, in 
 which some neat panels left by a mod- 
 ern carver had been painted with a 
 few saints on gold backgrounds, evi- 
 dently by some woman who had tried 
 to learn what she could from the ear- 
 ly Florentine masters and had done 
 the work in the true votive spirit, 
 without any taint of the amateur ex- 
 hibiting his irritating and futile imita- 
 tions of the celebrated artist business. 
 From such humble but quite accept- 
 able efforts, up to the masterpiece in 
 stained glass by William Morris and 
 Burne-Jones which occasionally as- 
 tonishes you in places far more re- 
 mote and unlikely than Birmingham 
 or Oxford, convincing evidence may 
 be picked up here and there that the 
 decay of religious art from the six- 
 teenth century to the nineteenth was 
 not caused by any atrophy of the ar- 
 tistic faculty, but was an eclipse of 
 religion by science and commerce. 
 
 17 
 
1 
 
 ON GOING 
 
 r T is an odd period to look 
 back on from the church- 
 goer's point of view those 
 i eclipsed centuries calling 
 their predecessors "the dark ages," 
 and trying to prove their own piety 
 by raising, at huge expense, gigantic 
 monuments in enduring stone (not 
 very enduring, though, sometimes) of 
 their infidelity. Go to Milan, and join 
 the rush of tourists to its petrified 
 christening-cake of a cathedral. The 
 projectors of that costly ornament 
 spared no expense to prove that their 
 devotion was ten times greater than 
 that of the builders of San Ambrogio. 
 But every pound they spent only re- 
 corded in marble that their devotion 
 was a hundred times less t^s Go on to 
 Florence and try San Lorenzo, a real- 
 ly noble church (which the Milan 
 Cathedral is not), Brunelleschi's mas- 
 terpiece. You cannot but admire its 
 intellectual command of form, its un- 
 affected dignity, its power and accom- 
 plishment, its masterly combination 
 18 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 of simplicity and homogeneity of plan 
 with elegance and variety of detail : 
 you are even touched by the retention 
 of that part of the beauty of the older 
 time which was perceptible to the 
 Renascent intellect before its wean- 
 ing from heavenly food had been fol- 
 lowed by starvation. You understand 
 the deep and serious respect which 
 Michael Angelo had for Brunelleschi 
 why he said " I can do different 
 work, but not better." But a few min- 
 utes' walk to Santa Maria Novella or 
 Santa Croce, or a turn in the steam- 
 tram to San Miniato, will bring you 
 to churches built a century or two 
 earlier ; and you have only to cross 
 their thresholds to feel, almost before 
 you have smelt the incense, the dif- 
 ference between a church built to the 
 pride and glory of God (not to men- 
 tion the Medici) and one built as a 
 sanctuary shielded by God's presence 
 from pride and glory and all the other 
 burdens of life. In San Lorenzo up 
 goes your head every isolating ad- 
 
 *9 
 
ON GOING 
 
 vantage you have of talent, power or 
 rank asserts itself with thrilling poig- 
 nancy. 
 
 ^N the older churches you 
 forget yourself, and are the 
 I equal of the beggar at the 
 'door, standing on ground 
 made holy by that labour in which we 
 have discovered the reality of prayer. 
 You may also hit on a church like the 
 Santissima Annunziata, carefully and 
 expensively brought up to date, quite 
 in our modern church-restoring man- 
 ner, by generations of princes chew- 
 ing the cud of the Renascence ; and 
 there you will see the worship of glory 
 and the self-sufficiency of intellect 
 giving way to the display of wealth 
 and elegance as a guarantee of social 
 importance in another 'word, snob- 
 bery z& 
 
 In later edifices you see how intellect, 
 finding its worshippers growing cold- 
 er, had to abandon its dignity and cut 
 capers to attract attention, giving the 
 grotesque, the eccentric, the baroque, 
 20 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 even the profane and blasphemous, 
 until, finally, it is thoroughly snubbed 
 out of its vulgar attempts at self-as- 
 sertion, and mopes conventionally in 
 our modern churches of St. Nicholas 
 Without and St. Walker Within, 
 locked up, except at service time, from 
 week's end to week's end without 
 ever provoking the smallest protest 
 from a public only too glad to have an 
 excuse for not going into them. You 
 may read the same history of the hu- 
 man soul in any art you like to select ; 
 but he who runs may read it in the 
 streets by looking at the churches. 
 
 IV 
 
 ONSIDER for a moment 
 the prodigious increase of 
 the population of Christen- 
 dom since the church of San 
 Zeno Maggiore was built at Verona, 
 in the twelfth and thirteenth centu- 
 ries. Let a man go and renew himself 
 for half an hour occasionally in San 
 Zeno, and he need eat no corpses, nor 
 
 21 
 
ON GOING 
 
 drink any drugs or drams to sustain 
 him. Yet not even all Verona, much 
 less all Europe, could resort to 
 San Zeno in the thirteenth century ; 
 whereas, in the nineteenth, a thou- 
 sand perfect churches would be but 
 as a thousand drops of rain on Sa- 
 hara. Yet in London, with near five 
 millions of people in it, how many 
 perfect or usable churches are there ? 
 And of the few we have, how many 
 are apparent to the wayfarer ? "Who, 
 for instance, would guess from the re- 
 pulsive exterior of Westminster Ab- 
 bey that there are beautiful chapels 
 and a noble nave within, or cloisters 
 without, on the hidden side ? 
 
 REMEMBER, a dozen or 
 so years ago, Parson Shut- 
 tleworth, of St. Nicholas 
 Cole Abbey in the city, tried 
 to persuade the city man to spend his 
 mid-day hour of rest in church ; guar- 
 anteeing him immunity from sermons, 
 prayers and collections, and even 
 making the organ discourse Bach and 
 22 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 Wagner, instead of Goss and Jackson. 
 This singular appeal to a people walk- 
 ing in darkness was quite successful : 
 the mid-day hour is kept to this day ; 
 but Parson Shuttleworth has to speak 
 for five minutes by general and in- 
 sistent request as Housekeeper, al- 
 though he has placed a shelf of books 
 in the church for those who would 
 rather read than listen to him or the 
 organ if This was a good thought ; 
 for all inspired books should be read 
 either in church or on the eternal 
 hills. St. Nicholas Cole Abbey makes 
 you feel, the moment you enter it, 
 that you are in a rather dingy rococo 
 banqueting room, built for a city com- 
 pany. Corpulence and comfort are 
 written on every stone of it. Consid- 
 ering that money is dirt cheap now 
 in the city, it is strange that Mr. Shut- 
 tleworth cannot get twenty thousand 
 pounds to build a real church j^jk He 
 would, soon enough, if the city knew 
 what a church was. The twenty thou- 
 sand pounds need not be wasted, 
 
 23 
 
ON GOING 
 
 either, on a professional " architect." 
 TOHILE lately walking in a 
 \polite suburb of New Cas- 
 ftle, I saw a church a 
 new church with, of all 
 things, a detached campanile ; at sight 
 of which I could not help exclaiming 
 profanely: <( How the deuce did you 
 find your way to New Castle ? " So I 
 went in and, after examining the place 
 with much astonishment, addressed 
 myself to the sexton, who happened 
 to be about. I asked him who built 
 the church, and he gave me the name 
 of Mr. Mitchell, who turned out, how- 
 ever, to be the pious founder a ship- 
 builder prince, with some just notion 
 of his princely function. But this was 
 not what I wanted to know; so I 
 asked who was the the word stuck 
 in my throat a little the architect. 
 He, it appeared, was one Spence. 
 " Was that marble carving in the altar 
 and that mosaic decoration round the 
 chancel part of his design ?" said I. 
 " Yes," said the sexton, with a certain 
 24 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 surliness as if he suspected me of dis- 
 approving. "The ironwork is good," I 
 remarked, to appease him ; " who did 
 that?" "Mr. Spence did." "Who 
 carved that wooden figure of St. 
 George ? " (the patron saint of the ed- 
 ifice). "Mr. Spence did." "Who 
 painted those four panels in the dado 
 with figures in oil?" "Mr. Spence 
 did : he meant them to be at intervals 
 round the church, but we put them 
 all together by mistake." " Then, per- 
 haps, he designed the stained win- 
 dows, too?" "Yes, most of 'em." I 
 got so irritated at this feeling that 
 Spence was going too far that I re- 
 marked sarcastically that no doubt 
 Mr. Spence designed Mr. Mitchell's 
 ships as well, which turned out to be 
 the case as far as the cabins were con- 
 cerned. 
 
 HIS Mr. Spence is an artist- 
 craftsman with a vengeance 
 f , Many people, I learnt, came 
 ^Sggjp^ to see the church, especially 
 in the first eighteen months ; but some 
 
 25 
 
ON GOING 
 
 of the congregation thought it too or- 
 namental. (At St. Nicholas Cole Ab- 
 bey, by the way, some of the parish- 
 ioners objected at first to Mr. Shut- 
 tleworth as being too religious.) Now, 
 as a matter of fact, this Newcastle 
 church of St. George's is not orna- 
 mental enough. Under modern com- 
 mercial conditions, it is impossible to 
 get from the labour in the building 
 trade that artistic quality in the actual 
 masonry which makes a good mediae- 
 val building independent of applied 
 ornament jb Wherever Mr. Spence's 
 artist's hand has passed over the in- 
 terior surface, the church is beautiful. 
 Why should his hand not pass over 
 every inch of it ? It is true, the com- 
 plete finishing of a large church of the 
 right kind has hardly ever been car- 
 ried through by one man. Sometimes 
 the man has died; more often the 
 money has failed. But in this instance 
 the man is not dead; and surely 
 money cannot fail in the most fash- 
 ionable suburb of Newcastle J The 
 26 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 chancel with its wonderful mosaics, 
 the baptistry with its ornamental 
 stones, the four painted panels of the 
 dado, are only samples of what the 
 whole interior should and might be. 
 All that cold contract masonry must 
 be redeemed, stone by stone, by the 
 travail of the artist-churchmaker. No- 
 body, not even an average respectable 
 Sabbathkeeper, will dare to say then 
 that it is over-decorated, however out 
 of place in it he may feel his ugly 
 Sunday clothes and his wife's best 
 bonnet. 
 
 OWBEIT, this church of 
 St. George's in New Cas- 
 tle proves my point, name- 
 ly, that churches fit for 
 their proper use can still be built by 
 men who follow the craft of Orcagna 
 instead of the profession of Mr Peck- 
 sniff, and built cheaply, too ; for I 
 took the pains to ascertain what this 
 large church cost, and found that 
 "30,000 was well over the mark. For 
 aught I know, there may be dozens 
 
 27 
 
ON GOING 
 
 of such churches rising in the coun- 
 try ; for Mr. Spence's talent, though 
 evidently a rare and delicate one, can- 
 not be unique, and what he has done 
 in his own style other men can do in 
 theirs, if they want to, and are given 
 the means by those who can make 
 money, and are capable of the same 
 want. 
 
 jSSgggSJHERE is still one serious 
 w&3& obstacle to the use of ^^> 
 SISLgJjm churches on the very day 
 ^gJSaffil when most people are best 
 able and most disposed to visit them. 
 I mean, of course, the services. When 
 I was a little boy, I was compelled to 
 go to church on Sunday ; and though 
 I escaped from that intolerable bond- 
 age before I was ten, it prejudiced me 
 so violently against churchgoing that 
 twenty years elapsed before, in for- 
 eign lands and in pursuit of works of 
 art, I became once more a church- 
 goer. To this day, my flesh creeps 
 when I recall that genteel suburban 
 Irish Protestant church, built by Ro- 
 28 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 man Catholic workmen who would 
 have considered themselves damned 
 had they crossed its threshold after- 
 wards. Every separate stone, every 
 pane of glass, every fillet of orna- 
 mental ironwork half-dog-collar,half- 
 coronet in that building must have 
 sowed a separate evil passion in my 
 young heart j Yes ; all the vulgarity, 
 savagery, and bad blood which has 
 marred my literary work, was cer- 
 tainly laid upon me in that house of 
 Satan ! 
 
 3255S30W the mere nullity of the 
 puilding could make no pos- 
 itive impression on me ; 
 Jbut what could, and did, 
 were the unnaturally motionless fig- 
 ures of the congregation in their Sun- 
 day clothes and bonnets, and their set 
 faces, pale with the malignant rigidity 
 produced by the suppression of all ex- 
 pression. And yet these people were 
 always moving and watching one an- 
 other by stealth, as convicts commu- 
 nicate with one another. So was I. I 
 
 29 
 
ON GOING 
 
 had been told to keep my restless lit- 
 tle limbs still all through those inter- 
 minable hours ; not to talk ; and, 
 above all, to be happy and holy there 
 and glad that I was not a wicked little 
 boy playing in the fields instead of 
 worshipping God. I hypocritically ac- 
 quiesced ; but the state of my con- 
 science may be imagined, especially 
 as I implicitly believed that all the 
 rest of the congregation were perfectly 
 sincere and good. I remember at that 
 time dreaming one night that I was 
 dead and had gone to heaven. 
 
 ND the picture of heaven 
 which the efforts of the 
 then Established Church 
 rjof Ireland had conveyed to 
 my childish imagination, was a wait- 
 ing room with walls of pale sky-col- 
 oured tabbinet, and a pew-like bench 
 running all round, except at one cor- 
 ner, where there was a door. I was, 
 somehow, aware that God was in the 
 next room, accessible through that 
 door. I was seated on the bench with 
 30 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 my ankles tightly interlaced to prevent 
 my legs dangling, behaving myself 
 with all my might before the grown- 
 up people, who all belonged to the 
 Sunday congregation, and were either 
 sitting on the bench as if at church or 
 else moving solemnly in and out as if 
 there were a dead person in the house. 
 A grimly-handsome lady who usually 
 sat in a corner seat near me in church, 
 and whom I believed to be thoroughly 
 conversant with the arrangements of 
 the Almighty, was to introduce me 
 presently into the next room a mo- 
 ment which I was supposed to await 
 with joy and enthusiasm. 
 2g53H|EALLY,of course, my heart 
 
 sank like lead within me at 
 i the thought ; for I felt that 
 
 my feeble affectation of piety 
 could not impose on Omniscience, 
 and that one glance of that all-search- 
 ing eye would discover that I had 
 been allowed to come to heaven by 
 mistake % Unfortunately for the in- 
 terest of this narrative, I awoke, or 
 
 3i 
 
ON GOING 
 
 wandered off into another dream, be- 
 fore the critical moment arrived. But 
 it goes far enough to show that I was 
 by no means an insusceptible subject ; 
 indeed, I am sure, from other early 
 experiences of mine, that if I had been 
 turned loose in a real church, and al- 
 lowed to wander and stare about, or 
 hear noble music there instead of that 
 most accursed Te Deum of Jackson's 
 and a senseless droning of the Old 
 Hundredth, I should never have 
 seized the opportunity of a great evan- 
 gelical revival, which occurred when 
 I was still in my teens, to begin my 
 literary career with a letter to the 
 Press (which was duly printed), an- 
 nouncing with inflexible materialistic 
 logic, and to the extreme horror of my 
 respectable connections, that I was 
 an atheist. 
 
 >HEN, later on, I was led 
 |to the study of the econ- 
 romic basis of the respect- 
 lability of that and similar 
 congregations, I was inexpressibly 
 32 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 relieved to find that it represented a 
 mere passing phase of industrial con- 
 fusion, and could never have substan- 
 tiated its claims to my respect if, as a 
 child, I had been able to bring it to 
 book sfj To this very day, whenever 
 there is the slightest danger of my 
 being mistaken for a votary of the 
 blue tabbinet waiting-room or a sup- 
 porter of that morality in which wrong 
 and right, base and noble, evil and 
 good, really mean nothing more than 
 the kitchen and the drawing-room, I 
 hasten to claim honourable exemp- 
 tion, as atheist and socialist, from 
 any such complicity. 
 
 v 
 
 NO when I at last took to 
 [church-going again, a kin- 
 [dred difficulty beset me, 
 [especially in Roman Cath- 
 olic countries. In Italy, for instance, 
 churches are used in such a way that 
 priceless pictures become smeared 
 with filthy tallow soot, and have some- 
 
 33 
 
ON GOING 
 
 times to be rescued by the temporal 
 power and placed in national galleries. 
 But worse than this are the innumer- 
 able daily services which disturb the 
 truly religious visitor. If these were 
 decently and intelligently conducted 
 by genuine mystics to whom the Mass 
 was no mere rite or miracle, but a 
 real communion, the celebrants might 
 reasonably claim a place in the church 
 as their share of the common human 
 right to its use >4^$> But the average 
 Italian priest, personally uncleanly, 
 and with chronic catarrh of the nose 
 and throat, produced and maintained 
 by sleeping and living in frowsy, ill- 
 ventilated rooms, punctuating his gab- 
 bled Latin only by expectorative 
 hawking, and making the decent guest 
 sicken and shiver and long for ser- 
 mons in stone, green fields and tem- 
 ples not made with hands ; this un- 
 seemly wretch of a priest should be 
 seized and put out, bell, book, candle 
 and all, until he learns to behave him- 
 self. 
 34 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 :~S^:QHE English tourist is often 
 lectured for his inconsider- 
 
 p * AHHd ate behaviour in Italian ^i 
 ^SJSSsBii^ churches, for walking about 
 during service, talking loudly, thrust- 
 ing himself rudely between a wor- 
 shipper and an altar to examine a 
 painting, even for stealing chips of 
 stone and scrawling his name on 
 statues. But as far as the mere dis- 
 turbance of the service is concerned, 
 and the often very evident disposition 
 of the tourist especially the experi- 
 enced tourist to regard the priest 
 and his congregation as troublesome 
 intruders, a week spent in Italy will 
 convince any unprejudiced person 
 that this is a perfectly reasonable at- 
 titude. I have seen inconsiderate Brit- 
 ish behaviour often enough both in 
 church and out of it. The slow-witted 
 Englishman who refuses to get out of 
 the way of the Host, and looks at the 
 bellringer going before it with " Where 
 the devil are you shoving to? M writ- 
 ten in every pucker of his free-born 
 
 35 
 
ON GOING 
 
 British brow, is a familiar figure to 
 me ; but I have never seen any stran- 
 ger behave so insufferably as the offi- 
 cials of the church habitually do. 
 F27HT is the sacristan who teaches 
 ^ you, 'when once you are com- 
 t mitted to tipping him, not to 
 M waste your good manners on 
 "i kneeling worshippers who are 
 snatching a moment from their 
 daily round of drudgery and starva- 
 tion to be comforted by the Blessed 
 Virgin or one of the saints ; it is the 
 officiating priest who makes you un- 
 derstand that the congregation are 
 past shocking by any indecency that 
 you would dream of committing, and 
 that the black looks of the congrega- 
 tion are directed at the foreigner and 
 the heretic only, and imply a denial 
 of your right as a human being to 
 your share of the use of the church. 
 That right should be unflinchingly as- 
 serted on all proper occasions >4^&> I 
 know no contrary right by which the 
 great Catholic churches made for the 
 36 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 world by the great church-builders 
 should be monopolized by any sect as 
 against any man who desires to use 
 them. 
 
 Y own faith is clear : I am 
 
 a resolute Protestant ; I be- 
 
 y/FJ aeve * n ^ e Holy Catholic 
 
 gg<; Church ; in the Holy Trin- 
 
 
 ity of Father, Son (or Mother, Daugh- 
 ter) and Spirit ; in the Communion of 
 Saints, the Life to Come, the Immac- 
 ulate Conception, and the everyday 
 reality of Godhead and the Kingdom 
 of Heaven. Also I believe that salva- 
 tion depends on redemption from be- 
 lief in miracles ; and I regard St. 
 Athanasius as an irreligious fool 
 that is, in the only serious sense of 
 the word, a damned fool. I pity the 
 poor neurotic who can say, " Man 
 that is born of a woman hath but a 
 short time to live, and is full of mis- 
 ery," as I pity a maudlin drunkard; 
 and I know that the real religion of 
 to-day was made possible only by the 
 materialist-physicists and atheist- 
 
 37 
 
ON GOING 
 
 critics who performed for us the in- 
 dispensable preliminary operation of 
 purging us thoroughly of the ignorant 
 and vicious superstitions which were 
 thrust down our throats as religion in 
 our helpless childhood. 
 
 rjjaOW those who assume 
 that our churches are the 
 private property of their 
 sect would think of this 
 profession of faith of mine I need not 
 describe. But am I, therefore, to be 
 denied access to the place of spiritual 
 recreation which is my inheritance 
 as much as theirs ? If, for example, I 
 desire to follow a good old custom by 
 pledging my love to my wife in the 
 church of our parish, why should I 
 be denied due record in the registers 
 unless she submits to have a moment 
 of deep feeling made ridiculous by the 
 reading aloud of the naive imperti- 
 nences of St. Peter, who, on the sub- 
 ject of Woman, was neither Catholic 
 nor Christian, but a boorish Syrian 
 fisherman. 
 38 
 
TO CHURCH. 
 
 r F I want to name a child in 
 the church, the prescribed 
 I service may be more touched 
 ^with the religious spirit 
 once or twice beautifully touched 
 but, on the whole, it is time to dis- 
 miss our prayer-book as quite rotten 
 with the pessimism of the age which 
 produced it. In spite of the stolen 
 jewels with which it is studded, an 
 age of strength and faith and noble 
 activity can have nothing to do with 
 it : Caliban might have constructed 
 such a ritual out of his own terror of 
 the supernatural, and such fragments 
 of the words of the saints as he could 
 dimly feel some sort of glory in \0? 
 My demand will now be understood 
 without any ceremonious formulation 
 of it. No nation, working at the strain 
 we face, can live cleanly without pub- 
 lic houses of some sort in which to 
 seek rest, refreshment and recreation. 
 To supply that vital want we have 
 the drinking-shop with its narcotic, 
 stimulant poisons, the conventicle 
 
 39 
 
ON GOING TO CHURCH. 
 
 with its brimstone-flavoured hot gos- 
 pel, and the church. 
 
 'N the church alone can our 
 need be truly met, nor even 
 there save when we leave 
 outside the door the materi- 
 alizations that help us to believe the 
 incredible, and the intellectualizations 
 that help us to think the unthinkable, 
 completing the refuse-heap of "isms" 
 and creeds with our vain lust for truth 
 and happiness, and going in without 
 thought or belief or prayer or any 
 other vanity, so that the soul, freed 
 from all that crushing lumber, may 
 open all its avenues of life to the holy 
 air of the true Catholic Church. 
 
 40 
 
SO HERE THEN ENDETH THE 
 PREACHMENT % ON GOING TO 
 CHURCH % BY GEORGE BER- 
 NARD SHAW **$& DONE INTO 
 PRINT BY ELBERT HUBBARD 
 AT THE ROYCROFT PRINTING 
 SHOP WHICH IS IN EAST AU- 
 RORA, NEW YORK, U. S. A. **& 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 This book is DIJEon t he last date stamped below. 
 Fine sc] 
 
 OCT 29 IP - 
 
 - \fiteKARY I 
 
 ^ OCT 61 
 
 tt\tf* 
 
 AUG &4 196 
 
 DEC 
 
 200ct'6lDM 
 OCT g |&j 
 
 201^631^ 
 m STACKS 
 
 JUL221964 
 
 ftECCia. DEC 5 1979 
 
 161983- 
 
 gtC. 
 
 CW.0EC 3" 
 
 LD 21-100m-12,'46(A2012sl6)4120 
 

 n 245 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
/ 
 
 b If, -