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Gift of
George L. Fox

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION

The
Outlook for Religion

BY
W. E. ORCHARD, D.D.
AUTHOR OF
'Evolution of Old Testament Religion," "Modern Theories
of Sin," "Problems and Perplexities," etc., etc.

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
New York and London
1918

Ali BIGHTS BESERVED

To
All who are fighting for conscience' sake;
whether in the trenches, or in prison

CONTENTS

PAGE

I —THE QUESTIONS OF THE HOUR
1. Will there be ant Religion left?  3
2. What Kind of Religion will it be?  23
3. What Type of Christianity will Persist? ... 47
IL— THE CRY OF THE TIMES
1. The Demand for Reality  73
2. The Charge against the Churches  94
3. The Discontent with Sectarianism  108
4. Which of the Denominatoins will Survive? . . 124
5. The Perils of Pacifism  150
III— THE HOPE OF THE AGE
1. The Re-commendation of Christianity .... 175
2. A New Christian Propaganda  200
3. The Social and International Application of
Christianity  226
4. The Emergence of a New Catholicism .... 255

I.— THE QUESTIONS OF THE HOUR

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION
LEFT?
THIS is a pessimistic start. But pessimism is
often a good mood to begin with. It at least
encourages us to look at the worst facts that can be
brought forward and to consider the worst possible
interpretation that can be put upon them. If we
feel, after due consideration, that these have to be
rejected, then we can move towards something
more hopeful, without the uncomfortable feehng
that we have left unconsidered possibilities behind
us. Everyone will recognise that the easy optimism
which characterised a good deal of late nineteenth-
century thought was dangerous and has betrayed
us. The doctrine of evolution was applied to
human life so confidently that it came to mean that
progress was inevitable to humanity; an irresistible
and quite mechanical power was at work in the
world which was forcing man upward, whether he
would or no. And when we contrasted our state
with the pictures of primitive man painted by
popular science, and while we were living in the
3

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
midst of a perfect rush of scientific discoveries which
were revolutionising the externals of life, then the
hypothesis seemed to be confirmed: we were pro
gressing, the dark ages were over, man had thrown
off his barbarian and animal ancestry, a path of
steady moral advance lay before us.
And now? Well, one is not so sure. We are
once more back at barbarity. The veneer of civil
isation is stripped away, and we are down to all
the primitive hates and fears. The war has de
veloped a ferocity and inhumanity which would
have been thought impossible a few years ago. We
have had to (consider the spectacle of the most
educated, advanced nation in the world perpetrat
ing the most frightful horrors, crashing through
an innocent country with awful brutalities, her
soldiery sinking to unmentionable bestialities, and
this justified by her statesmen on the plea of
military necessity, condoned and even praised by
her philosophers and theologians whom the whole
world had regarded as foremost in scholarship and
ethical enthusiasm. Superficial observers may com
fort themselves that the spectacle of Germany is
simply a case of atavism, a last throw back to the
beast before it expires within us. It is like one
of those monstrous births which sometimes appear
even in noble families. It is only a "sport," an
accident in an otherwise prevailing type. The
kindest thing is destruction, and when this is accom-
4

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
plished we can go on again with greater security,
sure that such a thing will not happen again, at
least in our lifetime.
People of deeper thought will want to know
what are the antecedent causes of this great human
apostasy. Our scholars have been probing down
into German thought to see if they can discover
the beginnings of this thing; some persons with
less claim to scholarship have essayed the difficult
task, and are already prepared to publish the results
to the world. The Kaiser, Bernhardi, Treitschke,
Nietzsche, Bismarck, Hegel, Luther even, are in
turn blamed for this horrid defection from humanity.
Rationalism, Liberal Theology, Protestantism are
pronounced by one hasty explorer and another to
be the soil on which this monstrous growth has
flourished. But this is getting dangerous, because
these things are not confined to Germany. Haeckel
has had probably as wide a circulation among the
English working classes, thanks to the propaganda
of the Rationalist Press Association, as among the
German Social Democrats. Our theologians have
accepted the researches, and in some cases the con
clusions, of advanced German Theology with avidity
and gratitude. Harnack's "What is Christianity?"
has not only saved the faith of many during a
time of strife and confusion, but his position has
been accepted by not a few in the ministry, and,
whether its origin is known or not, it is the religion
5

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of the majority of our thoughtful laity. The French
theologian, Auguste Sabatier, took much the same
position in his "Outlines of a Philosophy of Re
ligion" and his "Religions of Authority and the
Religion of the Spirit." Liberalism in theology is
with many of us still the one hope of saving
Christianity for this age, and has been hailed by
not a few as the veritable Gospel. And if Protest
antism is to be blamed for Germany's downfall,
how long will it be before the other great Protestant
nations, Britain and America, show the same symp
toms of disease? There is at least a call here for
careful judgment.
Moreover, in order to crush this monstrous
growth, what do we who hate it have to do? We
have kept ourselves free from the more violent
outrages of international law, and we believe that
our soldiers, even if they were let free in the flush'
of victory upon German soil, would never repeat
the story of Belgian atrocities. But we do find
that to crush an enemy in war one does have to
consider military necessities before ideal principles.
Fortunately we have a mighty Navy which is able
to exert pressure in a quite gentlemanly way.
We can trust the chivalry, the humanity, the un
failing good humour of our men to treat the
enemy, when wounded or prisoners, with kindness
and honour. But does anyone suppose that in
the frightful struggles of a bayonet charge all

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
soldiers do not have to put off the civilised gentle
man and fight like devils? The tragedy is that
to crush this monstrous manifestation we have to
adopt much the same methods and rely upon the
same primitive passions. Whoever is responsible
for recalling these things to life, they are not dead,
and they will not be the quicker extinguished for
the temporary licence that has had to be granted
to them.
The truth is, behind the European man, not to
mention the European woman, there is a savage,
and if we are going to prepare for wars and wage
wars, from whatever motive, then we shall want
that savage kept alive. With characteristic frank
ness and brutality this has been recognised in
Germany. It has even become a philosophy. In
other countries, and notably in our own, we do not
discuss this sort of thing. Like prostitution, it is
not talked about in polite circles, but the safety
of our homes is built upon it all the same. Ger
many has thrown over the restraints of senti-
mentalism and has in greater degree than other na
tionalities repudiated Christianity as inapplicable
to State affairs and International relationships.
Other countries have not openly admitted this to
be necessary, but in practice we all have to follow
much the same course.
It might be held, therefore, that the war has
altered nothing. It is only at such times that we
7

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
know ourselves, that we discover just how much
of our religion we live by. There is no new situa
tion created, save that the compromise is exposed;
which may be in some respects an ethical advance.
There is as much Christianity now as there was
before the war, and there will be as much after;
no more, perhaps, but no less. Yet this rigorous
and rather refreshing judgment overlooks the fact
that restraint has the value of keeping before you
an ideal, even if it cannot be closely followed. We
many of us have moments of evil passion, impure
thoughts, diabolical suggestion. It is not at all
certain that these would be got rid of the sooner
if only we allowed them to have expression. We
watch ourselves all the closer because we know of
our temptation. We allow to something higher in
us the superior right to dictate and control. Re
straint will kill these things much quicker than
giving them rein. Evil as well as good can die of
atrophy; an organ that is never allowed to function
is in time paralysed. Even the conventional recog
nition of Christianity, however much its hypocrisy
excites the scorn of some of our sarcastic moralists,
is a witness to something in us that agrees with
it. Something in us believes the Beatitudes, even
though as a matter of business we should never
dream of putting them into practice. There is
something extraordinarily attractive in the Sermon
on the Mount, even if its adoption would dis-
8

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
organise society. It is really no cure for moral
hypocrisy to say that we do not care for the heights
merely because we cannot attain them. That is
simply to exchange one hypocrisy for another. It
is possible that before the war no one really be
lieved in Christianity sufficiently to practise it, but
it is questionable whether we have got any further
when even professing Christians have concluded
that it ought not to be practised. However un-
ideal it be, it is certain that the great majority of
people are restrained by accepted beliefs, by the
opinion of society, by the vision of those who
have seen for themselves. Nothing is finally secure
until everyone believes on personal conviction,
whatever others may think, and guides his fife by
an authority his whole being can accept; but we
are not helped on towards that by repudiating all
ideals, all social restraints. If we could success
fully destroy the external and conventional recog
nition of religion, that of itself would certainly not
hasten its inner and real recognition.
But it will be denied that war time has entailed
any repudiation of Christianity as far as we are
concerned. It is held most firmly by the vast
majority of Christian people in these islands, and
almost without dissension among the leaders,
ministers, and theologians, that the wonderful
response of our youth at the call of their country
has been equivalent to a great confession of faith
9

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
in Christian principles. That the whole country
should have seen its course so clear when Belgium
was invaded, and that, at the cost of whatever
sacrifice, practically the whole of the available man
hood leapt to its protection, is an indisputable proof
that this, after all, is fundamentally a Christian
country, as evidently so as Germany is evidently
not; and that, despite all our fears, the young
men had the root of the matter in them. There
had been a good deal of headshaking over the
young men. They seemed out only for a good
time, they were utterly careless about religion,
they would not respond to the call of Christ. But
their patriotism, heroism, good-humoured en
durance of suffering and cheerful facing of death
prove that all the time they had really under
stood and were only waiting the call to something
definite. Any questioning of this seems only like
disparaging what they have done. The slightest
suggestion that there were other elements in that
response beside the agonised call of Belgium has
to support itself by ungenerous suspicions and
carping criticism. Since the world began it is to
be questioned whether there has ever been a nobler
response than that which the youth of England has
made. The war has surpassed all the heroisms of the
past. Never again can the charge of selfishness,
slackness, effeminacy be hurled at our genera-
10

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
tion. But what this really proves is simply that
human nature is capable of great sacrifice, that
youth only wants a real chance to display heroism.
For this is no distinctively Christian thing, other
wise we should have to allow not only that the
French youth were similarly moved by Chris
tianity, a thing that our ultra-Protestants would
hardly admit, but that all down the ages, back to
Carthage and Sparta, Christian principles were
the cause of patriotism. We need look no further
than patriotism itself, a natural instinct which
requires no theological sanction or Christian motive.
There is also no need to question that, so far
as the British people were concerned, this war was
not sought by them, was indeed thought to be so
unbelievable that a majority of them would not
consider its possibility or prepare against it; that
without the invasion of Belgium it would have
been impossible to have united the nation in
accepting the war; and that without the record of
atrocities it would have been impossible to have
introduced the idea of crushing Germany. On the
facts before the nation, and if uncaring abstention
was the only other alternative, the nation cer
tainly chose the better course. But that does not
close the question whether the diplomatists and
politicians, the newspaper proprietors and financiers,
have ever represented the nation, and whether they
have not used this splendid idealism for quite
ii

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
other ends; for they have certainly done their best
to destroy it. Nor does it close the consideration
whether war is a Christian way of doing things,
even of righting wrong and resisting aggression, or
whether the Church could not have found a better
way. But we have to face the fact that this splendid
moral awakening and wonderful national unity does
not show any signs of leading to a religious re
vival or awakening a national consciousness of
God. At the outbreak of the war there was a
confident expectation that it would bring a religious
revival. It was long overdue, and the signs were
propitious. Let us record what some of those
hopeful signs were.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century
Christianity was fighting what looked like an almost
hopeless battle with intellectual difficulties. The
critical examination of the Bible had seemed to
many the end of all things; but it at length gave
rise to a stronger conviction of the reality of its
inspiration and a clearer conception of the actual
message of the Bible to mankind. It is not too
much to say that on the old theory of the verbal
and equal inspiration of every part of the Bible,
its message was a very confused one. It gave equal
value to ceremonial and ethical religion, to per
sonal and doctrinal devotion. On the old under
standing it really did sanction slavery, polygamy,
12

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
cruelty, persecution. But criticism restored the
prophets in the Old Testament, and the Synoptics
in the New Testament, to a regulative position.
And this broke upon the world like a new revela
tion. There was confusion for a time, especially
in the realm of Christology; for because Christ
was seen to be human, according to the Syn
optics, it was open to be denied that He was
divine; but deeper thought soon moved to the
right conclusion that He was a Divine Person in
human flesh and the manifestation of what Deity
actually is.
The battle against determinism had gone very
hard, and in many quarters Christianity was being
adjusted, not without serious loss, to the mechanical-
evolution scheme. Transcendence was abandoned
for immanence, and God was in danger of being
identified only with what was discoverable in
nature and possible to man. If Christianity was
going to endure it seemed that it would be only
in a pantheistic form; and this meant reducing its
energy to a standstill, its doctrines to uncouth
symbols, its great experiences to simply looking at
things from the right angle, and Christ to a mere
symbol or even a myth. And then from the camp
of the apparently victorious enemy there came
sounds of dissension. Pure physics began to ques
tion the mechanical scheme, pure biology refused
to accept the chemical interpretation of life, pure
13

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
philosophy began to criticise the static Hegelian
rationalism. Science declared that movement, life,
progress were not self-explanatory, but, from the
point of view of naturalism, a sheer miracle. Not
only was creation no longer scoffed at as an im
possible idea, but it was discovered that there was
continual creation going on both in the material
and the biological realm. Philosophy began to
discern that more than rationalism is needed to
discover truth and more than a logical statement
to embody it. Truth is possible only to the whole
personality, both in its search and in its response.
This looked as if personality and not mechanism
was seated at the heart of things. So far, then,
from religion being a crude feeling after phi
losophy, the facts were the other way round;
philosophy was a mere abstraction of the truth
of the religious life. Psychology began to discover
that the human intellect, instead of being a mere
logic machine, was swayed by motives far beneath
the penetration of conscious thought; that there
were realms of unconscious activity which showed
that even sudden conversions were not abnormal;
and that there was possible ground in reality for
many of the hastily dismissed miracles which had
been recorded as accompanying epochs and indi
viduals of great religious insight.
With this change of thought Christianity
seemed about to enter upon a new era. A real in-

WDLL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
terpretation of Christianity in the light of modern
knowledge was seen to be possible without a pain
ful process of continual surrender and reduction of
its fundamental truths. All that was wanted now
was not so much an intellectual demonstration of
the truth of Christianity as its practical embodi
ment in personal and social life; it was not whether
it was true, it was whether it could be shown at
work. Everything was ripe for revival. The call
was clear; rivals and substitutes were beaten off
the field.
Then there came the shock of the war. This did
not find the more recent theology wholly unprepared.
The newer methods of criticism, as well as the
revolt against mechanism, were allowing us to re
interpret the Apocalyptic teaching of Jesus as
eminently sane. The New Testament was not
built upon the "inevitable advance" theory. It
believed rather in a great struggle and perhaps a
hopeless night as the prelude to the great deliver
ance and the morning of God. It was seen that
Apocalyptic dominated the outlook of Jesus and
interpreted His own self-consciousness, and there
was no longer any need to apologise for its view
of reality and its expectations concerning progress.
It was exactly along such lines that biology pic
tured the movement of life: a series of struggles,
crises, set-backs and forward rushes^
No wonder, then, that the outbreak of the war
15

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
was expected to revive religion. And hopeful
signs were immediately manifest: the deep serious
ness of the people, the mystic experience of the
new recruits, the calling of meetings for prayer and
intercession. It was rumoured that in France and
Hungary especially there was a great return to the
historic faith and a crowding to the churches.
And then somehow everything seemed to drag.
The churches were not long crowded; there was
no increase in membership, intercession services
began to drop away, religious hope began to wane.
The revival was not only strangely postponed, but
seemed to have been killed.
The public are difficult to satisfy. They came
to church in the early days of the war to hear what
the Christian preacher had to say; and then came
no more. If we had said that the war was wrong
and unchristian they would have hanged us and
burned our churches about our ears. But some
how they treated us even worse when they heard
what we had to say: that this was a Christian war
and our one loyalty to the Kingdom of God de
manded its prosecution at any price to a victorious
conclusion. Why did they not continue with us?
Because they could hear that very well elsewhere —
in secular gatherings and in the Press — without the
complication that Christianity seemed to bring in.
There were a noble few who took the middle view
that there would have been no war if the nations
16

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
had been Christian, which seemed to cast a reflec
tion on us somehow; who taught us that we must
love our enemies even while we were hacking them
to pieces or starving them into surrender, but that
seemed to weaken determination, and was not as
a matter of actual experiment found to succeed on
the battlefield, as some soldiers found to their cost.
There were those who said that we must see to it
that we did not make anything out of this war,
and afterwards we must be prepared to give and
take in order to create a world in which there
would be some prospect of stable peace. But when
one came down to details, as the headmaster of
Eton in an unguarded moment chose to do, one
saw that there was a different interpretation of the
war gaining ground. The declaration of The Times
that we were fighting for ourselves, the movement
to capture German trade, the determination that
the only way to establish a world peace was for
Britain to keep it; these things prevailed over the
attempt to keep a better ideal before the people;
our newspapers and rhetorical politicians have these
matters now in hand.
Those who took the frankly Imperial outlook,
and who told us to put aside all squeamishness, to
regard the killing of Germans as a part of Divine
Service, to exact a life for a life for all atrocities,
did not satisfy the fickle public either. Because
you can get all that sort of thing so much fiercer
17

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
and better put in John Bull, The New Witness, and
The Daily Express, The pulpit plays this tune far
too soft for those who have been used to the mega
phone and steam-hammer Press.
The Anglican Communion, with a temerity
which that body has perhaps never before attained,
attempted to organise a great call to Repentance
and Hope, and this was set about in an entirely
praiseworthy way. The leaders must have known
that there were national and certainly ecclesiastical
risks in such a movement. If anything like a great
religious revival was to sweep the country, it might
most seriously interfere with the national prosecu
tion of the war. When religion once gets going
it is likely to be a fairly absorbing and unpredictable
affair. If, on the other hand, the Mission has no
results, it will certainly not help to arrest the declin
ing prestige of the Anglican Church. It is early yet
to prophesy what the ultimate effect will be, but
its public start was unfortunate and uninspiring.
The controversy over women preachers was a
lamentable thing in the circumstances, and it is by
no means settled by the compromise that was
accepted. But the necessity for assuring the people that
there was to be no repentance for the country
being at war shut out certain areas from the fire of
the Holy Spirit, which seems to have had the effect
Of shutting Him out altogether. God may be
18

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
rightly invoked for special purposes, but something
has gone wrong when it is also stated what He is
not wanted for. Even Bishops cannot control the
Holy Ghost this way.
The conditions from the religious point of view
are more unpropitious. The whole nation and the
whole mind of the people is clamped down to this
one thing, the winning of the war, and we are
told in every speech of our leaders what alone will
win it, namely, men, munitions and money. Every
nerve must be strained, every penny must be spent,
the last drop of blood must be spilt if we are to win,
and unless we win it means the end of liberty and
civilisation. We need not think about what is
going to happen after the war; indeed, it is a duty
not to think, but to work. This all has its effect
upon the general mind, even upon the ecclesiastical
mind. A few earnest people try to make us be
lieve that prayer is one of the weapons that we
may put beside high-explosives in efficiency, but
this doctrine does not find favour, one suspects,
with the Ministry of Munitions or with the War
Office. No one who promised to spend sixteen
hours a day in prayer would be granted exemption
from military service on the ground that this was
work of national importance.
The general effect is obvious. It is seen that
spiritual forces do not really count. They may in
some mystical sense. The conviction that ours is
19

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
a righteous cause may enable a man to fight better,
but unfortunately that conviction is shared by all
the armies of Europe, including those of the
enemy, and the enemy's conviction will probably
increase as the balance of the offensive passes to
our side. There are few people who can pray with
any degree of sincerity that our shells may shatter
better than those of the enemy, or that our blockade
may be made more and more effective. Rightly
or wrongly, and despite the assurances of theo
logians, prayer falters at this business. Those of
us who pray about the war at all pray for the
preservation of our loved ones in the deadly struggle,
and we have no power left to pray for anything
else. For those who are chiefly interested in the future
of religion this is rather a gloomy time. There
are those for whom the problem of evil, a burden
heavy enough before the war, has now become
too much. Faith in God has collapsed. Soldiers
seeing the sights of the battlefield have very grave
doubts whether there is anything holy about war
or whether it can accomplish any good. Many of
them have found God in the face of death, but
many have lost their faith entirely and see only a
world in which savagery and mechanical devilry
rule. What many more must feel is that Chris
tianity is not practicable. They know that this is
not the way of the Cross. Jesus did not suffer in
20

WILL THERE BE ANY RELIGION LEFT?
the attempt to slay or punish His enemies. And,
after all, He had to die. No nation can be expected
to do that for the sake of truth. The talk about
spiritual power is seen to be useless. The bed-rock
facts of this world are evil, and nothing but the
borrowing of evil will overcome them. The only
way to defeat hell is to steal its weapons; the only
way to outwit the devil is to copy his devices. Re
ligion does not count.
Does this mean, then, the end of religion? By
no means. Why? Because religion is far too deep
a thing to be really amenable to any such conclu
sions. It may mean, probably will mean, that
many who have accepted the ordinary religion will
find that in face of the facts of life they can do so
no longer. But there will be others who will feel
just as keenly that religion is the one thing left.
Man cannot do without its consolations, and his
need is so great that in face of all the facts in the
world, and against all the logical demonstrations
that it is unreasonable, man, as a whole, would still
remain reHgious. If religion were proved untrue,
then man would prefer not to believe truth; for,
after all, there is little agreement as to what truth
is apart from religion, whether its ideal is attainable
by man, or whether the word really has any mean
ing. Religion has nothing to fear from rationalism.
There may be a great turnover of opinion, as there
always is as the result of such catastrophes, but it
21

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
will be in both directions. Religion will not really
lose by it. And beyond these natural causes there
is with us a far greater conviction. God is; and
so long as man also is there will be religion. Re
ligion may change; almost certainly will change as
the result of the war. There need be no doubt as to
its remaining.

22

II
WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WILL IT
BE?
Previous to the war there was a fairly widespread
opinion that Christianity was played out. It was
not a particularly well-informed opinion, and it was
probably held by those who had little inside knowl
edge of Christianity or who had never experienced
its soul-renewing power. Some, of course, held
this opinion in the belief that the great nineteenth-
century battles between philosophy, science and
religion had gone against Christianity, and that for
all intelligent men it was now finally discredited.
Outside a few intellectuals who professed an anti-
religious philosophy, and who were able by their
subtlety or their elusive wit to keep up a variety
of attacks on faith, and score off absurd individ
uals who were simple enough to take up their
challenge, these opinions only flourished amongst
those who were living on second-hand doubts or
only attracted that larger body of people who call
themselves modern because they have just caught
up to the intellectual fashions of the previous
decade, and are quite unaware that more recent
thought has already made all these things appear
23

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
more out of date than the speculations of the early
Greek philosophers. In a country of widespread
but superficial education, and where it has become
the fashion to appear emancipated and advanced,
there is always a very large number of persons who
either live in a weekly whirl of latest ideas or, pant
ing after more stability, are yet never able to catch
up to anything less than twenty-five years old.
The great changes of opinion that have overtaken
recent philosophy and science are still unknown in
these circles. And then there are the conventional
and loosely attached Christians of our time, kept in
scandalous ignorance by the Churches' lack of in
structional method, who are just discovering Dar
win, Spencer or Emerson, and are suffering vicari
ously all the throes of the mid- Victorian controver
sies in vain.
But there are more serious persons than these
to consider, who also are persuaded that Christian
ity is done, because they notice the inability of its
most earnest professors to live in their own times
and to respond to the demands of the age. Those
who have the most undisturbed faith seem to bury
themselves in the past; your militant High Church
man is still sighing after the Middle Ages and re
gretting the Reformation; while those who are anx
ious that the Church should speak to this age only
land us in a maze of modern discussion on sub
jects like socialism, suffrage, and sex, through
24

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WELL IT BE?
which they are quite unable to lead us, and even
tually fall back on such vague generalities that
what is wanted is Christianity, without being able
to tell anyone what Christianity has to say to these
things. Meanwhile Churches continue their old
controversies about vestments, infant or adult bap
tism, Establishment, Kikuyu and similar mat
ters; which, if not exactly like fiddling while Rome
is burning, looks like tuning up for some such per
formance. It might be admitted that there is a great stir
ring of concern in all the Churches, plenty of self-
criticism and endless conferences; but actual adven
ture, and the power to get any sort of united action
on anything that really affects the needs of the peo
ple, are noticeably wanting. Among the majority
of those attached to the Churches there is obviously
a faintness of conviction and a fading of enthusi
asm. Any sense of possessing an Evangel for the
Age is utterly lacking. Those who think they have
discovered what is wanted are soon found to be only
rehashing long-played-out heresy, some discredited
philosophy, or proposing some impossible return
to mediaeval conditions. It all looks as if Chris
tianity had lost the power of going any further; it
either remains immovably fixed or simply goes to
pieces. Earnest seekers are therefore on the look out for
another religion; for we have at least got as far
25

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
as recognising that some sort of religion is abso
lutely necessary. Very few turn nowadays to sec
ularism, atheism, or even agnosticism. The des
peration of our need is evidenced by the attention
that is being paid to the older religious faiths;
not nierely with the desire to study their beliefs and
customs as things of human and historical interest,
but in the fevered hope that perhaps they contain
the secret of salvation. Nothing is more sympto
matic of our condition than the proposal to adapt
Buddhism to the West and the strong attraction
that some of its doctrines have for the modern mind.
That many of its fundamental ideas are crude and
its basis an absolute pessimism; that it can be a gos
pel only for those who believe that man is chained
in an unending series of reincarnations and trans
migrations, does not seem to worry these wearied
seekers after rest. They are willing to accept the
undemonstrable theory of reincarnation simply in
order to be saved from it. There are even at
tempts being made to recommend the Koran as a
probable source of truth and Mohammedanism as
a worthy substitute for Christianity. A few dis
tinguished savants, who would have been secular
ists a generation ago, but to whom that refuge is
now closed by the recent researches into anthropol
ogy, have been so impressed by the universality, the
creative inspiration, and the fundamental need of
religion, that they propose to get back to what is
26

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WILL IT BE?
now considered its most primitive form, that which
expresses itself in ceremonial, inhibiting, of course,
all the intellectual constructions that were super
imposed by the mendacious race of poets and theo
logians.1 There have been frequent examples of
those who, charmed by the unclouded Greek mind
with its unconsciousness of sin, have urged its su
periority to Christianity ; 2 but these new proposals
take us much further back, and desiderate a return
to communal nature ceremonies. The next step
will surely be to discover what is the religion
of the advanced quadrumana; for if we only
widen the term sufficiently it may be found that
they possess one; and to recommend this as the
consolation to which the modern mind should
now betake itself. It would be easy to wax sa
tirical over these attempts, were they not pitiful
testimonies to man's unsatisfied need. And it is
certainly not becoming for Churchmen to scoff
at these wild proposals, and too late in the day for
Catholics to inform us that Christianity contains
all that was worth preserving in these religions.
For how does it come to pass that people do not
easily recognise that they have close at hand what
they are pursuing down these dim centuries, save
that they have so long been presented with only a
truncated Christianity? 18ee Miss Jane Harrison's "Themis."
'Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, for instance. d
27 I

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
It is in obedience to the same instinct that oth
ers, feeling that a return to any of the older re
ligions is absurd, have proposed that we should
select those great truths which each of them con
tains and construct a new eclecticism; or find an
interpretation of their common basis which ex
plains all their varying forms and ceremonies. It
is Theosophy which has done most to popularise this
notion, and has confidently announced an esoteric
clue which shows that all religions teach the same
truths under different forms. Theosophy has done
a valuable service in persuading a lot of not very
deep-minded people, who previously would have
been anti-religious, that there is something more in
religion than the average devotee or the average
anti-religious realises. Its great difficulty is that
the only religion of which it can make nothing is
Christianity; which refuses to be reduced to sym
bolic form, repudiates any esoteric secrets, and an
nounces itself to be the reality which all other
religions have groped after. Christianity pro
fesses to hold the clue to all other religions, because
it sets forth, not as symbol, but as the ultimate
personal reality, one who is the Desire of all na
tions. Still, Theosophy may advance to make that
discovery, for in many respects it is not far from
the Kingdom. But its existence would have been
made impossible if Christianity had not been pre
sented as intolerant to, and independent of, all other
28

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WDLL IT BE?
religions; a position that the Bible itself completely
contradicts. There have been other attempts to find a uni
versal basis for religion; one that has attracted con
siderable attention being that of Bahaism, which
proposes a universal faith in God and a universal
brotherhood of man. It has had some heroic mo
ments and some saintly interpreters, but save as
a possible stepping-stone from Mohammedanism to
Christianity it has nothing to teach the Western
world. A religion of faith in God and universal
brotherhood has been proposed again and again.
The difficulty is to find any true basis for such a
faith and any power to bring it into action. It has
been the claim of Christianity that in the Incarna
tion we have the final basis for faith in God, and
in the Cross the great reconciling agency. But
somehow this faith has not been made clear, and
we have been unable to set the Cross before men
after this fashion; and now we are faced with the
nemesis of our failure in numerous movements
which propose that we could attain these things all
the better without Christ and without the Cross.
Even professing Christians have advocated the un
ion of all the Churches on the basis of the Father
hood of God and the Brotherhood of Man — appar
ently with little knowledge that a religion of this
kind was tried as far back as Stoicism; with little
more than pious maxims as a result.
29

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Breaking out on quite new lines, we have to no
tice Spiritualism, Christian Science and the various
New and Higher Thought movements, together
with the remarkable revival of interest in mysti
cism of the less definitely Christian type. Each
one witnesses in its turn to needs that have not
been supplied by conventional Christianity. Spir
itualism ranges from scientific Psychical Research
to the crudest acceptance of seance utterances and
mediumistic dodges. It represents too pathetic an
attempt to pierce the veil not to deserve our sym
pathy, but the confused and cruel teaching con
cerning the after fife with which Christianity has
remained content, as well as the reaction from the
materialism which has dogmatically denied the other
life, must share the responsibility for its dangers
and delusions. Christian Science has been the most
remarkable modern movement in religion, and has
had a prodigious growth. Its philosophy is noth
ing more than a jumble of hypnotic ideas, and while
it produces at first a deeper peace than the older
faiths can give, the effect of shutting down the
mind against unpleasant facts must either end in
complete stagnation or suffer shipwreck on the
sterner realities of life. The great Christian Sci
ence newspaper does not publish any stories of
crime, but it has to tell its readers how the Great
War is going, though it does not descend to de
tails. It would, perhaps, have been better if some
30

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WELL IT BE?
of our newspapers had devoted less energy to de
liberate atrocity-mongering; but, on the whole, to
face the worst, even when exaggerated, is safer than
to hypnotise the mind with artificial optimisms.
Nevertheless, Christian Science shows that people
will follow definite teaching, however erroneous or
difficult, and all these systems reveal the failure of
the Church's present preaching system which seeks
to inspire without informing. The various forms
of subjective mysticism witness to the reaction from
a barren rationalism, they provide that internal quiet
which modern life denies us ; but it is tragical to think
that the Christian religion once provided all this with
an objective faith and within a sacramental system,
apart from which these new mysticisms only become
foggy or self-deifying cults.
It would be interesting to know just how all
these new movements have fared during the war,
but in the nature of the case no reliable informa
tion can be gathered. One would be inclined to
conclude that Christian Science would be hard hit
by the war, and that Spiritualism would attract
hosts of anxious inquirers; but in both cases this
is probably wrong. The "Thoughtists" must be
severely put to it to discern what thought can ac
complish in events like a world war; but they are
no worse off than Christians with their prayers. It
will probably not be far from the truth to say that
these movements have failed to gain further ad-
3i

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
herents in any large numbers in the present con
ditions. At least, we have one significant symptom:
so far, there has been no new religion founded dur^
ing the war, which, in these over-complicated days,
is something to be thankful for.
But there has been no visible movement back
to the Churches. There has been a desire for clos
ing up the Christian ranks; unity has been talked
of, proposed, and some tentative steps made
towards it. The Federation of the Free Churches
has come nearer realisation. The great movement
for Church Unity originated in America, which pro
posed to work towards a "World Congress on Faith
and Order," at which every Christian Church should
be represented, has not found war time propitious
for pushing things forward, but has been content
to mark time in the hope of better days coming.
But there is no popular demand for unity; no sign
of one of those great movements of will and powei
which sweep officialdom and prejudice aside and
are able to effect great changes at great speed. If
this instinct had showed itself strongly, and con
ferences of Christian leaders had been demanded
by the rank and file, we should probably have been
led to find a Christian ending for the war, and
thus have discovered a way to unity that nothing
would have closed. But not only have the old sus
picions and constitutional timidity sufficed to pro
hibit anything more than the feeblest advances,
32

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WDLL IT BE?
which have not been sustained, but the national
unity has proved the foe of any Christian Inter
nationalism. The World Alliance for Promoting
Friendship among the Churches has kept its ma
chinery going, and even perfected it, but it is quite
understood that there must be no attempt to put
this machinery into motion during the war. A
unique private gathering, representative of Brit
ish Christianity, was effected soon after the out
break of war, but it was much more conscious of
its British citizenship than of its membership in the
Catholic Church, and was content to affirm the
righteousness of the national cause. And now any
thing like an Ecumenical Council, which might
have been possible in the early months, besides be
ing objected to by most of the parties that could be
called to it, would certainly be prohibited by the
various belligerent Governments. Everything must
be done to keep the Church in its place, the mere
handmaid of political power and sanctifier of military
measures; and in this design most Church leaders
are vigorous and adroit supporters.
There are probably indications that the war is
leading to a closing up of the ranks on doctrinal
matters. There is a swing back to orthodoxy, a
feeling after dogmatic assurance concerning funda
mentals. Everyone sees that Christianity cannot
fight its battles amid these choking theological fogs.
But some who are backing to orthodoxy are doing
33

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
so with a clearer and perhaps revolutionary view of
what it entails. Convictions about the Absolute
Deity of Christ, the Final revelation of the way of
God in the Cross, the Divine institution and in
vestiture of the Church with the power of the keys,
are bound to raise suspicions about this new alliance
with the State in its redemptive way of war. But
there is really nothing of a movement afoot at pres
ent. A few individuals who have seen the issues
lit up for them by the war, and have come down
on the Christian side with a determination to die in
or die for this faith, even if they have to do it alone,
may be making a track across the wilderness which
may yet become a highway, but they have not yet
got further than pushing a few stones out of the
path. It is to be feared that there is a more general
idea that the war has provided the final example of
the failure of Christianity. It has not restrained
the Christian nations, it has not secured a faithful
following among those who profess it, it has had lit
tle influence over the great mass of the people. The
answer that this only proves that Christianity has
either never been tried or has simply been rejected
even by its most earnest supporters, does not really
meet the situation. For it still remains true that it
has not had power to constrain people to its prac
tice. Its chief influence has been in the realm of
the personal, and to that it has become more and
34

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WHX IT BE?
more confined. It has not been able to affect the
social and international realms.
A good deal of this failure will be traced to its
fatal ambiguity about war. While the professional
theologians are trying to prove that the Sermon on
the Mount has no reference to an international sit
uation, and that the application of non-resistance to
the circumstances of war is crude and unwarrant
able, it remains obvious that Christianity does con
tain a modicum of very perilous pacifism, not
only in some of the sayings of Christ, but in the very
principle of the Cross. Book after book has been
written to show that these are literal, sentimen
tal, unscholarly or immoral interpretations. Jesus
would never have said anything that was so
against common sense and the natural instinct to
defend yourself and your loved ones. He accepted
the State, and therefore war, and He never re
proved a soldier or called any man from the ranks
of the army to follow Him. If Jesus did say any
thing that might be interpreted as meaning non-
resistance, then it must be remembered that He
thought the world was going to end shortly. His
was an "interim ethic" that has been abrogated by
the fact that, quite unforeseen by Him, the world
has progressed to a civilisation that is partly Chris
tian. Moreover, the Cross is really the sanction of
just such a war as this, for the Cross means sacri
fice, dealing seriously with sin, sparing not even
35

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
the Only Son, who laid down His life to save others
because He would not save Himself. The national
rising to save Belgium, or even to protect our dear
ones, is Calvary over again; it is the soldier who
has taken up the cross and followed Christ. The
great issues between ourselves and Germany are
fundamentally those of "the Pierced Hand" against
"the Mailed Fist," Calvary against Corsica; we are
fighting for the Cross. Therefore this is a crusade;
it is a holy war. Or if there are some who discern
that this is going a little too far, who cannot help
remembering that Christ did not lose His life in
trying to save His mother or His disciples, or suf
fer in the attempt to punish the wicked for their
sin, and who point out that the Cross is the Just dy
ing for the unjust, the Innocent taking upon Him
self the penalty due to the wicked, the Strong
daring to put Himself unarmed at the mercy of His
foes, confident in the power of the Spirit alone ; then
it is declared that, while this is God's supreme
method, He obviously has other ways, which are ex
emplified in the processes of nature, human history,
and a tormenting hell for the disobedient. Beside
the New Testament there is the Old, and the Old
is not really abrogated. First the law, then grace.
Forgiveness comes only after the discipline of
punishment, and since nationally we are still at the
semi-Christian stage, these are the only methods
that it is open for us to employ. All talk of a
36

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WELL IT BE?
martyr nation is not only a dangerous application
to the national sphere of what is entirely spiritual
and personal, but it is probably blasphemous to
think that a nation could ever imitate the sinless
Son of God.
But the force and fury of all this attempt to
dispose of the pacifist interpretation of the New
Testament has been a trifle overdone. When we
have time to settle down again it will become clear
that in this controversy Jesus Christ has been de
prived of almost all significance and value for this
world. His claim of all power and authority, and
the apostolic faith in His historical and cosmical
significance, have been implicitly abandoned. And
what is left? Why, just as much place as the
German State theologian is willing to give to Him:
a mystic companionship, an inner shrine; while ex
ternally life is organised and politics are conducted
on entirely different principles. Indeed, the con
stant supply of articles and books which is being
brought up to bombard the pacifist position is
itself a confession of a strength in that position
which the pacifists themselves never dreamed of.
They are only the most insignificant minority; they
do not number amongst them a single leader of
opinion; most of them are tarred with impossible
heresies, they are recruited from the most diluted
type of Christianity, are chiefly cranks, and many
are frankly atheist. On the other hand, the
37

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Churches in these islands have never been so united
on any subject since the Reformation. The apolo
gists for the Christian sanction for war are only
giving these foolish ideas a further advertisement.
They must know that controversy often has an ef
fect the very reverse of what was intended. One
would think that the British nation was ih danger
of embarking upon some quixotic and fanatical ad
venture, or that the Army was on the point of re
volt, or that the Churches were being undermined
with sedition. On the contrary, battle flags are
grouped round the crucifix, used as a background
for altars and to protect the Blessed Sacrament.
There is hardly a Nonconformist service or meeting
at which the National Anthem is not a recognised
part of the proceedings. What turn of opinion are
they striving to prevent? Whom are they trying
to persuade? It looks almost as if they were not
sure of themselves.
But what will be the effect of this controversy
on the after- war judgment? It will be seen that
Christianity is capable of a dangerous interpreta
tion. The boasted bulwark of Protestantism, the un-
expurgated and unexplained Bible, will be revealed
to be just what the Catholics have always contended,
a dangerous Book; only now it is not the Old
Testament morality, the Cursing Psalms and the
militancy of the Apocalypse that have to be ex
plained for the benefit of the ignorant and literal-
38

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WILL IT BE?
istic, but the higher ideals, the ethics of the Cross
that must be explained away. Your militarist will
remember that the Bible is a national danger in
war-time. He will tolerate no religion in these
islands that might at a crisis endanger the national
cause. For it must be remembered that there are
also those who do agree with the pacifist interpre
tation of Christianity, who do believe that Jesus
taught all these dangerous attitudes of life, but
who believe that this is the Utopian ideal of a de
luded visionary, or a scheme of life that is absolutely
impossible. Every effort must be made to over
whelm this dangerous nonsense. Robert Blatch-
ford and Horatio Bottomley hold different opinions'
as to the value of the Christian religion, but their
conclusions as to the idiocy of pacifism are identical.
On the other hand, there are those who, long be
fore this war came, saw that the Bible as a whole,
and the prevailing interpretation of Christianity in
particular, was the greatest support of militarism.
They will be able to persuade many after this that
Christianity is the enemy and the Churches the
great hindrance to the progress and enlightenment
of the race.
Much will immediately depend upon the actual
results of the war. But suppose that there is no
overwhelming victory, no dictated peace, no Ger
many crushed beyond all fear of rising again; it
will be quite useless to go on with Christianity,
39

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
because we have been told over and over again that
if we do not win, and win overwhelmingly, Chris
tianity itself is doomed. Or it may be that, even
with great victory, the peace that is dictated will be
such that vast preparations will have to be under
taken to guard us from the new wars that the settle
ment will engender, and all the ideals for which life
was given so willingly, to make this a war to end war,
prove delusions. Or a wiser and sadder Europe,
with all the facts free to be considered, may discern
that the war was a tragic mistake, due to the
machinations of a few fire-eaters and the irresponsi
bility of the Press in every country; that at any time
it could have been prevented, and even when it had
broken out brought to a conclusion, if only the right
word had been spoken, if only the truth had been
allowed to be published. Then, with all the broken
and maimed men about us, with hearts that will
find little comfort then in the thought of a holy
war, it will be seen that Christianity is one of the
greatest international dangers. It will be recalled
that Christianity has blessed and discovered sanc
tions for every war that Christian nations have ever
waged, and it will be recognised that this war was
fundamentally no different from the rest. Chris
tianity will therefore stand forth as a system of
thought which blinds the mind, intensifies hate, pours
oil on a conflagration, provides beautiful ideals to
lure whole peoples to destruction. 40

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WELL IT BE?
The ark of God has been sent to the battle. It
may never come back or be mentioned again; or if
it returns, the people may destroy what they have
discovered to be a false and idolatrous Palladium.
Christianity will be condemned as impossible in
peace and dangerous in war.
What we are almost certain to see attempted
is a religion of sublimated patriotism. That is ob
viously the religion that works and one that we
can rely upon in times of national danger. These
questionings and conflicts which have hindered ef
ficiency would then be done away with. We can
see that in France patriotism has been sufficient.
There has been no need there to drag in Christ or
the Cross. The State must therefore clothe itself
with the repudiated divinity of the Church. Or
if it may not be safe to call the State a divine insti
tution, as encouraging dependence on divine favour
and protection, it must be regarded as the supreme
human institution, able to command and to absolve
from all personal responsibility or ethical scruples
in carrying out that command. The State takes
the place of the Church. It is actually being pro
posed that there should be for all young citizens an
equivalent for the Confirmation ceremony, in which
the State should be accepted and fealty sworn.1
This will put an end to all theological squabbles
and conflicting loyalties, and at the same time give
1 Syllabus of Fabian Lecture by Mrs. Sidney Webb, Nov. 24th, 1916.
41

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
definiteness to one's worship and objectivity to one's
devotion. Not Humanity this time, but England
and the Empire shall be the highest symbol of re
ligion, and "dulce et decorum pro patria mori" will
suffice to sanction the supreme sacrifice.
If England is going to carry the burden of
world Empire, and be the self -constituted guardian
of the world's peace, then we must have our chil
dren trained up in this idea. The Empire must be
the supreme end of their lives. For not without-
a great idealism can the practical effort, the mili
tary preparation, the educational inspiration be sus
tained. On every side we are seeing an attempt to
make this the real religion of the schools and the
basis for the ethical education of the young. And
it will be popular after the war, unless we have a
tremendous reaction of opinion. It will be little
use to point out that it is just this which has turned
Germany into a deified State, made her the anar
chist in the European brotherhood, given her a
diabolical will to war. For a time the attempt will
be made to provide a complete Christian sanc
tion for this supremacy of the State and the task
of Empire. It will be said that God has called us
to it. There might be a possibility of using that
ideal to educate the nation to trust to His pro
tection alone. But while the Church will be busy
providing sanctions, the real driving force will be
entirely secular, and in time the Church patronage
42

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WILL IT BE?
will be no longer needed and the Christian sanc
tion openly disavowed. The State has always used
religion for its own purposes, and then declared
war on it when it wanted it no longer.
Those who have seen these issues and are pre
pared to withstand them at any cost are fighting for
the old battle of the martyrs over again; as that
battle obviously had to be fought over again, seeing
that Constantine's act or the Church's acceptance
really forfeited everything they had died for. It
will be objected that the sufferings of pacifists are
too ridiculously unlike to be compared. If some
people had their way they would not be, and they
may come to imitate them too closely before the day
is won. Or it will be said that the martyrs had a
clear issue about which there was no possible con
fusion like that which obtains now. It was a case
of whether they would worship the Emperor; and
this was obviously impossible. But surely it was
not really so simple as that. The Emperors did
not want to be worshipped. They only wanted to
give a concrete form to loyalty to the Empire.
What they objected to about Christians was not
their obstinate refusal to sprinkle a few grains of
incense on the altar before the Emperor's statue,
for they allowed Jews to be exempted from that;
it was that Christians professed to have another
King and to believe in another Empire altogether.
Moreover, there were many of the early Christians
43

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
who apparently found it possible to sacrifice, not
only in sheer cowardice or betrayal, but no doubt
because they argued themselves into believing that
it was only a meaningless ceremony. It was only
a few out-and-out persons, the extremists, then as
now, who faced up to the real issue, whether they
could see all that they were fighting against or not;
it was Christ's Kingdom against the deified State
that was in contest, and that is in contest still.
And yet it is likely that other forces will mani
fest themselves at the close of the war which will
prevent this issue again being forced to such a
critical decision. Modern patriotism is strong
enough when danger threatens; it is likely to go to
pieces the moment the danger is removed. If the
end of the war should therefore bring about any
cessation of the European menace, this new re
ligious patriotism will be deprived of any suitable
stimulant. Moreover, if after the war there should
be a great revulsion from the policy which led up to
it, then patriotism will be at a discount for some
time to come. The State will be identified with
the Government, and the Government will be any
thing but worshipped. Therefore it depends on
whether we have to face a further menace of danger
after the war. If we do, the Churches will have
to decide whether they are going to cut out a path
for themselves and resist the popular tendency, or
whether, having learned nothing, they will throw
44

WHAT KIND OF RELIGION WILL IT BE?
themselves into the one task of national defence.
In either issue, humanly speaking, it will go hard
with Christianity. To attempt to stand across the
path of national safety, after what has happened,
will almost certainly entail national rejection of
Christianity and the suppression of the Church;
while to side with the new national tendency will
bring about in time the entire disappearance of
Christianity as a distinctive religion. It will serve,
as in Germany, simply as a convenient support to
the State, while all along the revolutionary element,
which will perforce be secularistic and anti-Chris
tian, will be increasing in strength.
And yet Christianity will survive; if not as a
force which has its centre in Western Europe, yet
it may be transplanted to a virgin soil and be ac
cepted by some more adventurous people. The re
jection of Christianity by Western Europe would
not necessarily see the last of Christianity, for with
that rejection it would not be long before European
civilisation perished as completely as some of its
predecessors. The great lesson would have been
learned, the new nations would know that Chris
tianity was not only essential to human life, but
they would also see that the compromised Chris
tianity of European industrial and military civilisa
tion was a useless danger. It is true that as a
social and international ethic Christianity has not
yet been tried. But it is the only way of progress
45

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
that still stands open. Therefore its great unful
filled ideal will remain to lead some more consistent
and simple-minded people into the Promised Land.
On the whole, it should not be surprising that Chris
tianity has taken all these centuries to understand
and to approach, if it is indeed the final faith and
destiny of the human race. Its rejection by Europe
might be only the way to secure its fuller adoption
by some other people. We have no need whatever
to give up hope of Christianity, for there is hope
nowhere else; and it is as yet much too soon to give
up hope of Europe coming to realise that, when she
wakes from her fever and recovers from her pres
ent madness.

4(5

Ill
WHAT TYPE OF CHRISTIANITY
WILL PERSIST?
Pre-war Christianity may be fairly described as all
sixes and sevens. Not only was there a tangled
and many-coloured fringe concerning which no one
could be sure whether it was to be classed as Chris
tianity or not, but even in the centre, where the
faith was confessed and stoutly fought for, the fight
ing was chiefly amongst ourselves. The Church
presented the appearance of a disorderly rabble,
without leaders and without objective, cries clamour
ing for direction answered by voices as varied and
futile; not at all as our favourite hymn describes
us: "Like a mighty army
Moves the Church of God," •
but something much more like a football scrim
mage. In the "free" Churches this was not counted
such a disgrace; indeed, was sometimes defended
as salutary, of the very genius of our faith;
for anything could be tolerated save uniformity.
But in the "catholic"- Churches, where this sort
of thing was most to be deplored, it also most
47

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
obviously existed. The recriminations of the con
tending factions in the Church of England, for
instance, often assumed a character which would
be more pardonable if two opposing religions were
in controversy; while the mutual attitude of Non
conformists and Anglicans was, in all charity, far
removed from anything that might be expected to
characterise two regiments fighting on the same
side and for the same object. If there were signs
of a more blessed toleration stealing over the field
of Christendom, it was due rather to a weariness of
the fray, to a fading of conviction, and, above all,
to the general feeling that none of us quite knew
where we were. One of the most widely read and
discussed books of the times had for its title "What
is Christianity?" The very fundamentals were in
question, not only in Theology, but in Ethics.
There seemed to be no guidance left in the Christian
faith as to what we ought to believe or how we
ought to act. Those who maintained a passionate
attachment to the faith did so from intellectual or
devotional necessity; but in neither case did they
seem able to show what it meant for the living of
life. That was left to be decided by politics or
economics. Unless Church funds were in question,
or denominational prestige in danger of suffering
some slight, no decision on any vital concern could
be reached in any Church assembly, except it could
be made of such a colourless character or plati-
48

WHAT TYPE WELL PERSIST?
tudinarian nature that everyone could vote for it
because it really committed one to nothing what
ever. So far as it is possible to distinguish types of
thought in this welter of opinion, we may say
that there were, roughly, two main divisions:
orthodox and liberal. The orthodox were divided
into catholic and evangelical: those whose standard
of orthodoxy was Church teaching, and those whose
standard was the Bible. The orthodox of both
branches were largely opposed to reform of any
kind in Church, Society or theology. Either, in
the case of the catholics, they were constitutionally
opposed to it, or, in the case of the evangelicals,
they were sure that reform ought to be postponed
until everyone had been converted; when presum
ably no reform would be needed.
The liberals embraced all those who were con
vinced that Christianity must be reconciled to the
demands Of the modern mind, to which the old
formulas were either meaningless or impossible.
But here also two very different schools can be
discerned, namely, those who were inclined to make
the modern mind the standard to which everything
in Christianity must be reduced, and those who felt
that Christianity was the real standard which only
needed to be reinterpreted in order for the modern
mind to embrace it with enthusiasm. In the former
case the supernatural element had to be entirely
49

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
eliminated. There was only one sphere of reality,
that which was now determined by science. Jesus
Christ was simply a human being, one of the race,
coming into the world, as we all do, by the sole
will of His parents. His Cross was not the means
of salvation; that has to be wrought out by each
man for himself in terms of character. The Church
was not only an effete institution, but perverted
in its essential idea. What is perhaps most wonder
ful about this reinterpretation is that it should
maintain that all that Christianity had ever done
for men could be set forth within this scheme;
indeed, its inner life was to be saved for the modern
world by tearing off these external husks.
The other type of liberalism endeavoured to
keep more closely to the great ideas of Christian
doctrine, giving them, however, a more universal
interpretation. God, the Being worshipped by
Christians, really existed, but He worked only
through the scheme as fixed by natural science;
though He was to be found within the heart in a
way that seemed to assume that there He had a
somewhat freer field. The "immanence of God"
was the watchword of this school. Divinity was con
ceded to Christ because it could be conceded to all
men, at least potentially. Christ was the measure of
what man could be, the highest manifestation of the
Godhead immanent in humanity. The Cross was
the way of salvation, but it operated only in those
50

WHAT TYPE WILL PERSIST?
who themselves took up their cross. The true idea
of the Church was held to be better embodied in
the notion of the Kingdom of God, which consisted
in improved social relationships; those who had
seen it from afar and were working towards it
being the members of the Kingdom. This type of
thought was bound to be a trifle vague, but it had
the advantage, common to all mists, of being able
to spread itself over a large area. It could touch
the more definite orthodoxy on one side, and it was
also able to embrace the more extreme and negative
liberalism. It must be carefully remembered that these
divisions are only to be taken as convenient general
isations. The areas thus defined were broken up
by cross divisions, by strange filiations, and by per
sonalities who somehow managed to combine what
seemed natural opposites. Anglo-Catholics could
be named who professed a Socialism that would
satisfy the most rigorous tests. There was grow
ing up a "high-broad" school in Anglicanism,
an "evangelical-sacramental" school in Noncon
formity, while among Quakers and Plymouth
Brethren there might be found a fairly "high
church" doctrine. A general awakening to the
Social Problem as the greatest challenge to the
Christian faith, and the need of a different social
order as one of its essential embodiments, was
making itself manifest not only in forcing members
5i

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of churches to face and study the facts, but actually
holding out the promise that the approach to unity,
which seemed so closed ecclesiastically, might be
found in this direction. But the movement could
hardly claim to be really representative, and it
was inclined to end with study, or to give tentative
backing to social proposals which among socialists
themselves were already going out of fashion.
And down upon this hopeless confusion there
crashed the catastrophe of the war. Our task is to
try to estimate what effect it will have upon the
pre-existing chaos. It can hardly make the con
fusion worse. It may be that this baptism of fire
and hammering of awful facts will eventually fuse
and fashion our fragmentary Christianity into an
instrument more fit for fighting its foes and for
getting work accomplished. But all hope of a swift
and sudden process must now be abandoned. It
may be that underneath the suppression of indi
vidual thought which the war has occasioned there
may be going on a making-up of the mind which
will display itseK after the war in mass convictions;
that the marking time, which is the order of the
day for all enterprises, will have stored up an im
pulse which will manifest itself in very rapid move
ment the moment the order is given to march.
On the other hand, it may be that the present
development of the civilised mind has passed for
ever beyond the possibility of corporate thought
52

WHAT TYPE WILL PERSIST?
and concerted action. That mass convictions rule
in war-time may only make them more suspect
afterwards; for the sort of corporate thought and
concerted action prevalent in war-time is indis
putably a reaction to a lower level. It has meant
everywhere the sterilising of intellect and the sup
pression of the moral consciousness. It is for much
more subtle indications that we must search, at any
rate for the present.
One can detect that theological liberalism may
suffer in popularity because of its German origins.
"Made in Germany" has always been a useful
sneer for certain audiences when critical conclusions
had to be discredited. It is a device which even
well-informed and much-indebted scholars have now
shown themselves not unwilling to use. Since the
German theology known in this country is nearly
all of the advanced order, it must be that which is
responsible for the collapse of moral judgment in
Germany; the meticulous scholarship for which she
is so famous must be the cause of that incapability
of reading the psychology of the situation which
governed Germany's plunge into war, and seems to
have dictated her whole policy ever since. It must
be the rationalising element in her theology that
has produced the extraordinary lack of humour
which alone can explain her conviction that the
war was forced upon her, and that she is waging
it on behalf of civilisation. A great deal of this is
53

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
grossly unfair. It seems not to be known in this
country that some German theologians, and most
German pastors, are very orthodox; but it is only
the unorthodox theologians that can secure trans
lation into English. If liberalism is the cause of
Germany's fall, then some of our liberals ought to
recant or to go into exile for not recognising before
the connection which now they announce so guile
lessly. It may well be that there is some rational
connection between German liberalism and the idea
that State ethics are beyond the range of religion;
but it is questionable if it is yet understood what
the connection is; and very similar ideas are dis
coverable in the works of both liberal and orthodox
theologians here at home.1 It is, unfortunately,
one of the general agreements of modern theology,
that the teaching of Jesus has no reference to the
State. Still, we are considering what effects are
likely, not what ought to be; and if it can be
shown that a liberal idea first occurred to a German,
it will not secure its welcome by our Christian
public for some time to come.
It is likely that a more definitely religious im
pulse will operate to send us all back to the more
central concerns of the faith, even if only with
more passionate questions on our lips. Is there a
God? Can Jesus Christ help our world to-day?
^p. Forrest's "Authority of Christ," and Feile's "Reproach of the
Gospel." 54

WHAT TYPE WILL PERSIST?
Is there another life beyond this? Does prayer
make any difference? What did Jesus do on the
cross, and how does it save me here? Ought there
to be any difference between the Church and the
world? It is to these critical issues that all our
thought is bound to be driven, for these are the
things about which we really must be sure. Faith
is backing to its citadel. This is not to be gathered,
it must be admitted, from the correspondence
appearing in our religious newspapers, which is
more circumferential and trivial now than ever.
But that is because the central facts are raising
issues that few of us dare face, fewer feel able to
speak about, and fewer still assume the responsibility
for openly discussing. Never was expressed opinion
less guide to what is going on within. That the
other movement is alive may be gathered from the
questions that the soldiers always put, from the
murmuring response which a daring word will un
expectedly evoke, and especially by the quickening
of that movement which had begun before the war,
where among the intellectuals and the advanced
there was beginning a reconsideration and redis
covery of the fundamental truths of the Christian
position. What some will call a revival of "superstition,"
and others will call a manifestation of religious
devotion, may be looked for, and is already mani
fest. The "liberals" know that we are in for a
55

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
revival of sacramentalism, prayers for the dead, the
restoration of the crucifix and all the other externals
of Catholicism. It will be as difficult to repress as
to explain this, for it is simply a dumb craving
that turns to the ancient forms of expression, and
is directly inspired by the horrors of the time.
When evil is so visible one wants some visibility
in one's religion. A purely inward worship cannot
support itself against the sights and sounds of a
world at war. Militarism lives by symbols, uses
every external device to recruit; Christianity must
copy the soldier, as it has always done. Whether
this is all to be condemned as "superstition" or
recognised to be natural, and already provided for
in catholic customs; and whether it is to be left to
superstition to exploit or given a higher meaning
congruous with spiritual religion, must depend upon
the sort of teaching that is forthcoming. That
these customs will be revived is certain. Before
we have done the crucifix may be as common in
England as on the Continent. How many good
Protestants must have found themselves praying for
the dead, even if they never meant to, these last
years ! Prayer craves to hold the very feet of Christ
in its agony, and unaccustomed steps may be taken
to where, as in the Reserved Sacrament, Christ is
held to be present in more than spiritual form.
There may be a falling back to a more definite
connection with the Visible Church. The feeling
56

WHAT TYPE WILL PERSIST?
after fellowship is strong in these days. It must be
difficult for anyone to go out to a game of golf on
a day set apart for national intercession. Church
is almost the only place where you can get com
munal feeling now. Many have adopted the opinions
they now hold about war not, as they imagine, be
cause of reason or religious convictions, but because
they cannot bear to be out of the common stream
of thought. And where this is felt the strongest
the National Church must hope to gain the most;
for it is the Church which, rightly or wrongly,
claims to be the most identified with the history
and cause of the nation. The Anglican Church
knows that it has the opportunity of a century and
is trying to seize it, and even a militant Noncon
formist may hope that she will not fail, if it is the
worldling she means to move.
But it must be understood that these are at
present no more than straws on the stream, and
they have to be watched very carefully to detect
whether the stream is moving at all, or in which
direction. There is one unity that the war has forced upon
the Church, namely, a unity of conviction that our
cause is righteous, that there was nothing else to
be done, and that to beat our enemy so that he
can never play this game again is a task for which
we can implore Divine aid. Here the Church stands
beside the national conviction, ready to pledge
57

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
all her spiritual power in support. There has not
been such a united church opinion for centuries.
It is only natural. It is supported by the only facts
most of us know, and the only facts some of us
want to know; sanctified by the willingness of our
youth to sacrifice themselves to the uttermost; con
firmed by the enormities of the German method of
making war. There may be considerable deductions
to be made from the evidence when the war is over
and criticism is free ; when the censorship is removed
and our surviving soldiers get their memories back
and their uniforms off; when we once again allow
ourselves to imagine what our method of war
appears like to enemy lands where limbs and hearts
can ache just like our own. It will be realised
then that war itself punishes sufficiently without
vengeful reprisals. But we shall then also discover
that its worst infliction is wrought on the mind
which it seals against thought, and on the heart
which it steels against feeling. Yet the Church
cannot be blamed. She has done the natural thing.
The lads having gone, not only from Music Hall
and Public House, but from Choir and Bible Class,
no word must be allowed that would enfeeble them
in their task, and everything that can support them
must be said. The Church has only been human
after all. The only difficulty is that the Church is
supposed to be a supernatural institution and a
divine Society, and we know that she has often
58

WHAT TYPE WILL PERSIST?
been at her best when she has faced the world
alone. To find ourselves in such perfect agreement
with the world is rather disconcerting. And with
it all there is the fact that although we have placed
everything at the world's disposal, our sanctions,
our assurances, our spiritual power, the world does
not care whether we do or not, has never thanked
us and is never likely to. The work of the churches,
in so far as it has materialised in collections, in
the help given to the soldiers by the Y.M.C.A.,
the Church Army, or the Salvation Army, is
acknowledged and appreciated. But nothing is said
about the spiritual support given to the national
cause; no word of relief that the Church has not
questioned or withstood or discouraged the war;
no recognition of the prayers, the sermons, the
books put forth in such abundance.
Is it that the world knows it can always reckon
on church support for this sort of thing, and there
fore took it for granted? Is it that the world
places no real value upon the spiritual support we
have given? It is a disquieting silence, and when
we have time to notice it there will be a lot of
thinking to be done.
But here is the unity of the Church at last
attained. Archdeacon Wilberforce and Father
Bernard Vaughan agree that in this present issue
the killing of Germans is not only not to be ques
tioned or deplored; it is doing God service. Dr.
59

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Forsyth and Mr. Campbell may not agree at all
in their interpretation of Christianity, but they
do agree that Christ is an encouragement to a war
like this. It is true to His spirit, His teaching, His
temper, His cross. The Church Times and The
Christian World, The British Weekly and The
Universe, are for once in absolute agreement. The
only quarrel that disturbs the serenity of the relation
ships between Anglicans and Nonconformists now
arises out of any suggestion that the Church has
sent more men into the army, or that Noncon
formity naturally manufactures conscientious ob
jectors. The Church stands solid. Yet there are
no Te Deums for the Church at last made one.
But it is felt to be not enough for the Church
to side with the nation. There must be some means
of showing that one's principles, and not mere expe
diency or circumstances, commit one to the position
that is taken up. And then it is that the old
differences begin to show themselves and the old
confusions re-emerge. For it is difficult to be
lieve that principles so absolutely opposed should
naturally lead to the same conclusion. And in the
effort to get back to something solid as a sure
ground of support it is gradually being revealed that
some principles are more easily applicable to the
support of war than others.
An unquestioning orthodoxy is perhaps the best
support for war; because one can either fall back
60

WHAT TYPE WELL PERSIST?
upon Catholic teaching, which has never regarded a
defensive war as other than justifiable; or there is
the Thirty-seventh Article, which settles the matter
for Anglicans, that at the command of the magistrate
it is lawful to wear weapons and serve in the wars;1
and for those who take the Bible as inspired equally
all through, there are the magnificent examples and
encouragements of the Old Testament which pro
vide sanctions up to the complete extermination of
women and children.
Yet, even where external authority is accepted,
there is generally a disposition to show that it
agrees with reason and conscience, and so these
canons are by themselves felt to be insufficient for
any but the intellectually servile, and then even the
literalist finds himself in some doubt the moment
he begins to inquire for himself. There are other
commands in the Bible besides those to exterminate
the enemies of the Lord; exhortations to feed, to
forgive, to love your enemies; which seem to run
counter to anything that war strategy allows.
Plymouth Brethren, who have always stood aloof
from politics as no concern of the Christian, find
themselves unmoved by the political arguments
which are sufficient for some Free Churchmen, and
very doubtful whether these worldly means are
lawful for a Christian. Christadelphians, Millennial
Dawnists, and others of similar views see in the
1 Presumably any war that happens to be going.
61

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
present catastrophe the final judgment or some
herald of it; and they do not feel called upon to
take any part in inflicting a judgment from which
they look to be saved. The Roman Catholic finds
the war a matter of deep distress, because he be
longs to an international Church, and there are
Germans and Austrians who believe exactly what
he believes, who pray the same prayers and offer
the same sacrifice in the same tongue; and although
he has been taught to acknowledge that in these
matters he has to follow the command of his secular
superiors who wield God's judging sword, there is
the Pope giving voice to quite different sentiments,1
which, if they do not hinder a loyal Roman Catholic
from becoming a soldier, make prayer seem more
important, and these pathetic appeals from Christ's
Vicar cannot but stir strange thoughts. In some
countries the Pope's appeals have been practically
suppressed, and in others have had to be farced with
explanatory statements in order to bring them into
line with national sentiment. "National" Churches
are freed from these distressing considerations.
Thus the broader type of Evangelical finds that
some of his principles seem to need a certain ad
justment if they are going to be made to support
war. There is the question of the Cross, to him
the only means of salvation. Did not God here
punish the innocent in place of the guilty? Did He
1"The Pope on War and Peace." Burns and Oates.
62

WHAT TYPE WILL PERSIST?
not take man's sins upon Himself rather than exact
their just penalty? He may comfort himself that
the two theologians in this country who have made
the subject of the Cross their special concern, Prin
cipal Forsyth and Principal Denney, are one in
holding that the Cross is the supreme sanction of
such a war as this. The Cross shows that God will
not forgive unless someone is first slain. The Cross
is a manifestation of the holy justice of God. "It
is the salvation of righteousness in blood."1 This
sounds a little hard, and it is difficult to see how
it sanctions those who were the enemies of God and
have been forgiven because someone else died for
them setting forth to slay their enemies. The world
has to be redeemed by blood, sin can be washed
out in no other way. But by whose blood? Still,
here are those who have devoted a lifetime to the
study of the Cross. They must know, and they are
absolutely sure. It is a little more difficult for the
Evangelical to surrender to the popular notion that
because a man gives up his life for his country and
dies on the field of battle he has a claim above others
on the mercy of God. That seems to cut away
the idea that salvation is not by works, but by faith
in Christ alone. Moreover, does it apply to
Germans or Turks? If one shrinks from this be
cause of the dangerous extensions of the doctrine
that seem unavoidable, then there is the idea of
1Cp. Dr. Forsyth's "Christian Ethic of War."
63

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Purgatory to be looked at. It has a bad origin,
but it embodies the convenient notion that the
soul, not quite ready for the sight of God, may be
purified and made ready beyond this life. That
Purgatory is in the Catholic scheme only intended
for the faithful is apparently overlooked in some of
its hasty Protestant adaptations. Evangelicalism
has been hard hit in the war; how hard we shall
not know till we have time to take stock.
But it is liberalisin which seems to leave most
room for the sanction of a war ethic. In Anglicanism
the Broad Church tendency to Erastianism de
mands that the Church must meekly submit to
the dictates of State necessity and provide them
with appropriate theological sanctions. To advanced
Nonconformity the Church is nothing more than a
human institution of quite temporary significance.
It possesses no corporate illumination greater than
that of any other assembly of human beings — no
greater than Parliament, for instance. It does not
hold the keys of the Kingdom in its priestly hands.
It must conform to the ordinary laws of human
association by which the law of the average and the
pace of the slowest must guide all action. There
fore the Church cannot expect to exert any special
power at a time like this. If politicians say there
is only one way, it is not for the Church to ques
tion it. If the minds of the masses are locked to
a certain purpose, however false, the Church is not
64

WHAT TYPE WELL PERSIST?
called upon to exercise any peculiar powers to under
mine their resolution or endanger her existence by
any melodramatic interference. The Church can
only move when the people move. She has no
duty to call people beyond their powers of reach.
The idea that the whole scheme of human his
tory can be explained by evolution, interpreted as
an inevitably microscopical advance, within which
even God Himself is confined, is a great help when
the dilemma is discerned between the world's way
of redemption by war for righteousness, and Christ's
way of setting forth the righteousness which dies
for your enemies. The world can only move towards
Christ's higher ideal gradually. Anything like an
attempt to force the pace will only put things
back or wreck itself upon vain hopes. God moves
not only by means of Christ's method, but also
through the slow discipline of history. If people
cannot see Christ's way, or follow it, they must
learn by the other way, and it is not for the Church
to condemn the world which is doing the best it
knows; it must actually support the world in its
second best. That Jesus died just because He did
things before the World was ready to follow Him,
and by this brought the Kingdom of God near to
man, and that every movement in history has been
effected not by slow, inevitable pressure, but by
those who have been willing to die for the thing
that seemed far off, does not seem to make any
65

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
impression on those who use these arguments.
The very capacity to imagine anything different,
or to adventure towards a great ideal, has been de
stroyed by the paralysing notion that all advance
must be gradual and completely internal. This
type of mind is enslaved to a naturalistic Erastianism.
The greatest of all defences for war can be
found in the liberal estimate of the Person of Jesus.
Jesus must not be in any sense identified with
God. Alongside Jesus there is the Infinite and
Mighty, of which Jesus is only a very diminished
image or specialised revelation. It was all Jesus
could do to die; but with the Almighty Father
there are other ways. If Jesus may be regarded in
some sense as an incarnation of God, it must be
only of a part of God, His compassionate and for
giving side. The world was made and is governed
by force, not by love, and it is this that God must
still employ upon those who are incapable of re
sponding to love. If liberalism is willing to allow
more deity to Jesus, still He is God only in a state
of humiliation. We must think of Him as raised
to another type of existence by the resurrection,
clothed again with the power of might and the
authority of an indisputable will. It is this Christ
who is now acting with the awful powers of Deity.
Or, more commonly, liberalism contents itself with
restricting the area of Christ's authority. Jesus
only concerns Himself with one side of life, the
66

WHAT TYPE WELL PERSIST?
inner and personal. He says nothing about the
State, war, social evils, economic problems. He
ministers consolations to the soul. He sets before
us a liberating ideal; but externally life has to be
lived by other principles where His authority does
not count. Jesus reveals what God is in His private
capacity ; but God has also to act in a public capacity,
when there are other things to be considered.
It is obvious that alongside the liberal Jesus
there is room for another deity, the God of the
State, the God of this world. But it is also obvious
that in this duality the Christian faith has been
completely surrendered. All that the Church fought
for at Nicea, the confession that in Jesus Christ we
knew the Eternal God to the very substance of His
nature, is abandoned. We are left absolutely with
out guidance, and it can be seen that Jesus is a
person who must be politely bowed out whenever
public business has to be discussed.
Popular liberalism, for all its pride in its
modernity, is always behind the times; sweating to
fit the Christian religion into a mechanical evolu
tionary scheme, only to wake up when its task is
done to find that science has now abandoned the
mechanical scheme as no true representation at
all; drawing a picture of a meek and lowly Jesus
who would not dare to interefere with world condi
tions, just as the Gospels are discovered to be
aflame with an apocalyptic Figure who professes to
67

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
hold all history in His hand, to precipitate judg
ments on the world when His Church goes to sleep,
and to be the Author, not the subject, of all the
crises that come upon mankind.
Now it may be fair to say that this liberalism
has in Germany sanctioned the erection of another
altar to the worship of the God of State Necessity;
whence might is right, and the preservation of the
State becomes the sole guide of all politics. And
in this country it is here and there discerned that
this is the enemy that we have to fight. But if
this doctrine has found a ruthless and efficient em
bodiment in Prussia, it is, nevertheless, the tendency
at least of all modern Statecraft whatsoever, which
is now conducted on a thoroughly secular basis.
And if the war can be used to waken the world
to see that this is in complete opposition to the
faith which claims that Christ is King of kings
and Lord of lords, the Ruler of all kingdoms, the
Judge of nations; and that the way of war, with
its sabre-rattling preparations and its mailed fist
policies, is the complete antithesis to the way of
the Cross; is it open to us, who have to use the
same means, to claim that we are fighting for the
complete identity of Christ and the Godhead,1 that
we are fighting for the Pierced Hand as against
the mailed fist? We may claim that we are fight
ing for these things, though it would come as a
^'Ancestral Voices," p. 14. Dr. J. A. Hutton.
68

WHAT TYPE WELL PERSIST?
perplexing revelation to many of the fighting units;
but it is doubtful if these methods will spread the
Nicene faith among the rationalists of Germany; and
how would it be a victory for faith unless the enemy
accepted the faith? We may be fighting for the
Cross, but can we claim that we are fighting with
the Gross, that the Cross is the weapon with which
we fight?
We are back at the old confusions. Those who
stand for the dogmatic faith seem no more able than
others who deny it to see to what that faith com
mits them, and in the crisis they stand side by side
with the liberals whom they charge with having
surrendered it. This agreement between avowed
enemies must make those who are seeking a full
presentation of the Christian faith see that neither
orthodoxy nor liberalism is going to help them much
further on. If this coalition religion succeeds it
means the obscuration of Christianity under forms
for which men are willing to die, but by which they
are unable to live, and the approximation in prac
tice to a liberalism which is guided throughout
by a timid, official, professorial view of Christianity,
without adventure or imagination, or if any more
illuminated, then so timid that it believes only in
leavening the lump and at the same time doing
everything to prevent it rising: a very nice class
room, sacristy, and devotional religion, but one which
has no application to history or the world; a religion
69

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
which believes in an Incarnation only for the
purposes of theological discussion, or a religion
which must never become incarnate at all.
If there is discontent with this, and there is
anywhere a determination that Christianity shall
not be surrendered, we must look for a new group
ing, the formation of an opposition out of hitherto
disconnected elements. One can dimly see what
elements might unite to resist this thoroughly
paralysing compromise. There would have to be
the apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus blended
with an unbending Nicene Christology; a combina
tion of evangelic faith in redemption by the Cross
alone, coupled with a Catholic conception of the
Church as the Divine Body which is to live as well
as preach the Cross. This might give us a whole
Christianity knit together at last, an instrument for
God's redemption of the world. What is discredited
in this crisis is a reduced and souvenir Christianity.
What stands out untried, almost unrealised as yet,
is Christianity as a living whole, a Christianity as
great, as simple and as unified as Christ.

76

IL— THE CRY OF THE TIMES

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
We have suggested that the only Christianity
that has promise for the coming days is one
that might be obtained by cross-breeding from those
strains which have hitherto drifted apart, one that
might be formed by the fusing of elements that have
hitherto never been combined. The analogies sug
gested are worth consideration, for they hold good
for more than passing illustrations. Christianity
has not only been fatally fissiparous, but the isolated
growth along different lines reproduces both the
narrowness of uncriticised and unbalanced sec
tarianism and also the fatal weakness of in-breeding,
so that even what may be good in a denominational
difference comes to be held as a mere tradition.
The constituent elements of Christianity have been
analysed out, and each set to do the work of
attacking some hardness or corruption which will
yield only to the compound. Every type of Chris
tianity is failing to-day just because it is a type.
The excellences of each are negatived by its partial
and uncorrected witness. But even if we could
agree upon the elements which especially need to
73

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
be brought into intimate contact, it would still be
unlikely that we could agree how this ought to be
accomplished. Everyone who desires a reunion of
the Christian forces, whether a synthesis of the
opposing schools of thought or the union of eccle
siastical denominations, must soon conclude that it
can only be brought about by some catastrophe
that will fling them violently together, or some
great internal fire that will fuse them to one tough
and tempered metal.
The external catastrophe of the war has not
accomplished this,, and at present there is little in
ternal warmth which might be converted into the
veritable blast furnace that would be needed to melt
some of the elements that have to be fused together.
Here at home there is no great religious fervour;
there is not even any great religious concern. The
salutary if inoperative criticism of past years has
been suspended, and the one duty sufficiently
absorbing seems to be that of "carrying on."
Nothing is to be expected of the home churches
just now. How could there be with their most
vigorous men absorbed by the army and the women
engaged in a thousand and one tasks of help,
worn by grief at irreparable loss or by even more
exhausting anxiety? The war absorbs all activity
and thought. To say that there are things more
important than the war may be a truism, but it
also happens to be treason, if it is really meant.
74

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
Yet no external necessity has the power to repress
religious concern if it once gets started, and there
must be some reason deeper than the external fact
of war which is depressing religion in the nation.
There is no doubt that, however justified it may
be, the conviction of the complete righteousness of
our cause is not an aid to religion. There is no
inherent necessity why our being in the right should
prohibit the true religious attitude; it ought to call
forth deep thankfulness that God should have
enabled us to keep our hands clean; it ought to
give us a good conscience toward God that would
be a tremendous asset in the struggle. But this
righteousness is, unfortunately, too like the brand
that the Gospel has taught us to diagnose as the
most withering disease that can ever take hold upon
man, namely, that of self-righteousness. It has to
be remembered that the number of definitely reli
gious people in these islands is now a very small
proportion, and while the righteousness of the
nation in this crisis will be traced by them to the
grace of God, the great majority would utterly fail
to appreciate a righteousness that was dependent
upon anything outside themselves. One only needs
to see this righteousness on purely ethical grounds
carried out on to the national plane to understand
how sound the religious suspicion of this variety
has been. It is bound to measure itself, not by some
ideal standard, but by comparison with the enemy.
75

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
We see them only externally, ourselves only as we
appear to ourselves; and some conception of the
possible perversion of vision this may produce may
be gathered from the fact that the enemy thinks
of himself as we do of ourselves, is just as confident
of the righteousness of his cause, and thinks us to
be what we think them: self -deceived, blinded
hypocrites. It would still be possible for a whole
hearted conviction of righteousness to be held with
some sort of religious sanction; for it is perfectly
possible that there may be situations in which the
right is on one side and the wrong on the other;
and this may be one of them. But the religious
man would still think of what he owed to the grace
of God, and he would take care to examine what
had contributed to another's fall, and take heed lest
he fell in like manner. But with a righteousness
which is attributed to oneself, the judgment is
bound to be adopted that we are righteous because
we are British, because that is our nature and
character; the Germans are unrighteous because
they are German, because it is their nature. This
is how the majority of people obviously think.
Anything more utterly hardening of the moral con
sciousness cannot be imagined. We can see now
what a purely ethical system would do for humanity.
Wherever two nations come to a misunderstanding
that issues in war they are bound to go on to abso
lute extermination. A non-religious ethicism would
76

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
be the most fatal cul-de-sac into which humanity
could ever be led.
It would still be open for religious people, con
vinced of the overwhelming justice of their cause,
to find themselves pulled up by the consideration
whether one had the right to cast the first stone
unless one vas sinless; and there are things in our
past history that at least might somewhat extenuate
the German fall. Germany is not the first country
that has believed herself called of God to rule the
world for its good. The question might be raised
whether, even if the cause is righteous, this way
of war is sufficiently righteous for such a cause.
But that seems to be settled by the conviction that
there is nothing wrong in taking a man's life as a
preventive against his taking your own or someone
else's, and even if it were doubted whether this
was the best way there is the conviction that at
present no other way is open to humanity. And
there the matter is closed. No one seems to re
member that war does not kill people in the way
we think we have the right to kill them when they
have committed some crime like murder: namely,
by a quick, certain and painless death; for war
tortures, maims, blinds, drives mad. It would be
a simpler ethical problem if war was equivalent to
execution. It is not. There are none of the safe
guards of legal justice, such as professional judge,
the common jury, and, above all, no counsel for
17

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
the defence is allowed; the wrong person may get
executed, generally does, and he may get only half
executed after all. And no one seems to inquire
how, under the present supports and arguments,
war is ever going to be stopped, for we have at
least advanced so far that the great majority of
people believe it ought to be stopped.
But even in the present acceptation of war re
ligious people might still feel that no war could be
won save in dependence upon the help and approval
of God. There ought to be constant prayer for
victory, constant prayer that we should not become
like the enemy. It has been found quite impos
sible to work up this kind of prayer at all. There
is first the inevitable judgment that what counts
far more than prayer in a material struggle is
material resources, preponderance of munitions and
superiority in gun efficiency. Once the doctrine is
accepted that when evil manifests itself in the form
of force nothing but force is available ; then spiritual
forces have to be discounted or rated very low.
But even if prayer could be insisted on as a force
that acted somehow beyond our understanding, it
is found very difficult to pray for victory in any
detail or with imagination; difficult to pray that our
guns may be better aimed and do more damage
than the enemy's, that our diplomacy may win over
some reluctant nation to come out on our side. It
is no use; we have at least jjot beyond using prayer
78

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
for such purposes. Here are the causes for the
deadness of religion amongst us. There were times
when religion and war could go together. Those
times have gone for ever, and it is useless to blind
ourselves to the fact.
There are few who will be able to gauge the
moral deterioration that follows upon such condi
tions. It is in the interests of those who believe
that war is right, and this war religious, to show
that no such deterioration has taken place. But
can anyone doubt that there has been a great relaxa
tion of moral restraint, the evidence for which is
patent in the more unblushing flaunting of tempta
tion on our streets, in the music halls, and in the
lewd papers of the baser sort? But the most pious
people now express themselves in sentiments that
would have been unthinkable a few years ago, the
Press prints stories that it would previously have re
fused, there is an absolute repression of all fairness
and sympathy. Nothing can be more humiliating
to read than the jeers and sneers that accompany
any Press quotations of German opinion, itself
selected only from the worst utterances that can be
found; or the gloating over the evidences of suf
fering, anxiety or straits among the enemy. The
pulpit has fallen the farthest, because higher things
are expected of it; but some of its utterances can
hardly be outdone by the worst type of hysterical
and bloodthirsty newspaper. And yet we print
79

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
statements of what is said in German pulpits, mostly
on the same principle of selecting the worst, some
of which have been proved to be entire misrepre
sentations, and profess our amazement when similar
things have been said in our own. The difference
of judgment may be defended, but we wonder how
the Christian pulpit is going to answer the charges
that will be made after the war, when these things
are collected and served up, as they will be, for
purposes of infidel propaganda.
It is evident that no one can expect a religious
revival in conditions like these. No one hopes for
a revival at home; but there is still a hope that a
religious revival will come from the trenches and be
brought to us by the returning soldiers. They will
bring a new life to the Churches and waken the
land to its need; for we at home have not seen war;
they have; and there lies our hope. This hope, ex
pressed so confidently earlier in the war, is being
considerably sobered as time wears on.
What are the prospects of a religious revival in
the army? There has been the splendid response
of the youth of these islands, an uprising at the
call of duty which is unparalleled in history, and
which has completely refuted the idea that the
new generation was decadent. No sacrifice has been
too costly to make. Men have shattered their life
prospects, the careers for which they were preparing;
they have sacrificed a future of comfort; they have
80

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
many of them reversed the convictions of a life
time; many of them going into this thing not be
cause they thought it right or even hoped anything
from it, but because we were in it and there
seemed nothing else to be done. On the top of
that there has been the revelation of incredible
heroism. There is nothing these men are not pre
pared to attempt, to risk, to endure. We have
simply armies of heroes, any one of which deserves
to be immortalised. Feats of bravery have taken
place that wipe out the greatest stories of olden
times; and they will never be remembered, simply
because there are too many of them. It is not
surprising that the Church has interpreted these
phenomena as implicit religion. Here is the effect
of Christian conviction operating underground, but
at last revealing itself. The countless sermons and
Bible Class instructions have not been in vain.
These men have really grasped what Christianity
means, and have risen to a confession of it such as
we hardly hoped could have come in a day like ours.
Their sacrifice baptizes them with blood into the
name of Christ ; their death is a fulfilment of Christ's
saying: "Greater love hath no man than this, that
a man lay down his life for his friends"; they
have indeed taken up the cross and followed Christ.
The great Christian hymns are sung with a new
meaning: "Onward, Christian soldiers," "Fight
the good fight with all thy might." The crucifix
81

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
is raised not to appeal for mercy on their souls,
but as their own only adequate memorial. They
are commemorated on All Saints' Day with those
whom the Church has canonised: martyrs, Apostles,
confessors, great adventurers for Christ.
Now no one cares to detract a word from this.
One does not criticise expressions made in the
hour of grief. Nothing too high can be said of what
these men have done. But is this judgment accepted
by the men themselves? Do they care for this
description of what they have done? Has it helped
the armies to keep alive their consecration, to go
on to recognise the religious character of their
vocation? Does it cheer them to be told that this
is a holy war? It does not. It- only excites bitter
comment. This appraisement of the religious im
plication of their response is not accepted by the
army as a whole.
It is obviously difficult to discover what seven
million men are thinking. As well inquire what is
the opinion of London. Every variety of religious
and irreligious opinion can be discovered in the
army, just because every variety existed before in
the men who now compose it. But is there any
discernible change which can be described as a move
ment towards religion? It is generally admitted
that there is not. There are individual letters,
some of them printed, which show how religion has
become infinitely more real to those who have now
82

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
seen what humanity is capable of. Many who
went out with religious convictions not only hold
them more intensely than ever, but have resolved
that on their return they will give themselves in
some form or other to making religion the chief
end of life and its propagation their career. In
other cases reticent lads, who made no professions
at home and whose case caused concern to their
pious friends, now write home speaking franldy of
religious matters, and giving no uncertain testimony
as to what they have come to discover and hold.
Over against these we have to place other letters,
which will not get printed, witnessing to a burden
ing perplexity as to the compatibility of war with
Christianity, sometimes leading to the decision that
Christianity must go. Many have lost their faith,
and these not only those who just accepted conven
tional religion, but who had taken part in Christian
work, taught in Sunday Schools and so on. The
reports of Chaplains give the same conflicting
testimony. They know of cases of men who, face
to face with death, have come face to face with God.
The men ask questions which evince a desire for
assurance as to whether there is a God, whether
there is a life to come, how Jesus can get out of a
book into a man's heart, and whether prayer has a
real efficacy. There is also the discovery, which
might have been made at home, that even those who
register themselves as Christians show remarkably
83

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
little acquaintance with what Christianity means.
A noticeable difference is said to be manifest be
tween those who have never been in action and
those who have been in the trenches. Before going
into action there is a solemnity that is open to
serious impression. But the presence of the Chap
lain while fighting is actually going on is said to
be disliked as being ominous, a reminder of the
possibility of death; and when men get back, either
unscathed or in hospital, everything is blotted out
in the great good luck of coming through, even if
minus limbs or in pain. The wonderful work of
the Y.M.C.A. has perforce had to concern itself
with physical comforts and recreation, and what
the army would have done without this organisa
tion one cannot imagine. The devotion of the
workers, the dispatch and efficiency with which the
situation has been realised and met, deserves more
praise than is ever likely to be expressed. But of
intimate religious work there is not in the nature
of the case so much to be told. The men wel
come the meetings that are held for them, and
listen attentively to the addresses that are delivered
by well-known evangelists. But there is no sign
of a religious movement. It is difficult for those
who speak to the soldiers to steer between regard
ing them as saints who have nothing to learn and
sinners who stand in special need of conversion.
More good is evidently accomplished by those
84

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
who abandon the ordinary approach to an evangel
istic appeal and speak to the men along the
lines of Christian evidence or Christian Missions.
A distinguished Y.M.C.A. worker gives it as his
opinion that along these lines a revival may
yet be expected, but he adds the alarming rider
that if the revival does not come now it will not
come after the war, so far as the soldier is con
cerned. If we turn to mass observation the situation is
anything but hopeful. The profanity so common
in the army is very shocking to those who are not
used to it, but it probably has little significance, for
it was, unfortunately, already a habit both with the
working man and the university student, so that it
is not surprising to find it appearing in the army.
It has, however, not only increased, but, accord
ing to numerous accounts, it has degenerated into
a nauseating obscenity which ought to be revolting,
and the fact that it is not so is the more dis
quieting. One other fairly consistent report may
be mentioned. There is a sort of religion very
common with the Forces at the front, but it is a
religion of pure fatalism, the idea that when a bullet
comes over with a man's name on it, that will be
his end.
There is a new movement which is beginning
to manifest itself, and this may have dangerous
issues. The soldiers are getting dissatisfied, "fed
85

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
up," as they would express it. This is not caused
by the inevitable discomforts of army life, or by
the sufferings they are called upon to face; nor
perhaps by any waning belief in the righteousness
of the war or any questioning of war in general;
but by the doubt whether England is worth fight
ing for. They find on their return that the Eng
land they left behind, no doubt always idealised,
and never more so than now, has sadly changed.
They find the insolent and brutal opinion on top
which before was decently concealed. They resent
the continual invasions of civil liberty and the
petty persecutions that are going on. They fear
the effect of the war upon social conditions as they
witness the gradual filching away of hard won
liberties and the increasing power of vast employers'
combines. They resent both the rosy idealism
through which people at home envisage war and
the insensate hate of the enemy. The soldier finds
it difficult in the face of the things he has to do to
idealise war at all, and he discovers that you cannot
hate your enemy when you see him lying dead.
And that all this should have to be borne and done
in order to protect people who are frothy and futile ;
that men should talk as if all this sacrifice was to
accomplish was to destroy competition and facilitate
commercial dominion, is breeding a deep anger.1
1 Cp. "Some Reflections of a Soldier." The Nation, October 21st,
im, 86

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
"I'm not going to fight for a race of damned
shopkeepers," is one rather illuminating if brutal
remark. A man rolling up to the train for
France drunk, but with some glimpse of facts and
a frankness in stating them, shouts in anger:
"I'm not fighting for my wife and family, I'm
fighting for a lot of bloody civvies." There is a
temper here which, if it should develop, will per
haps become dangerous to the situation at the front,
and will certainly make our problems embittered
after the war.
But it is really unfair to judge the men by
what they say and do at present. To ask how
opinion is tending in the army is rather like having
dropped your watch into a mortar-crushing machine,
wondering whether the effect will be to make the
watch lose or gain. If the men come back brutal-
ised, enslaved to vice, too stunned to think about
anything, and too worn out to put their hand to
the greater war that will have to follow, how could
we ever expect anything else? Some will come
back hopelessly perplexed, with problems to be
answered, not with problems solved. Beside those
who are crippled in body for the rest of their lives,
there will be those who will be wounded in mind,
with memories that haunt, and the Church may
find that absolution after the event will not be so
easy to get accepted as the indulgence she pro
claimed for those who should take life under Govern-
87

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
ment orders. Many who gave themselves in fine
enthusiasm will come back disillusioned, perhaps
ever afterwards to be suspicious of all ideals what
soever. It is being asked, What will they demand
from the Churches? Many of them will demand
nothing, because they have never expected any
thing from them. Others will demand nothing,
because they will never darken our doors again.
They will have done with us once for all. "If after
this my parson says a word about forgiving enemies
or any of that tosh, I will walk out of the church
and never go back." We may expect something
of that spirit; no more Sermon on the Mount; it
does not work. Others may come back a type of
pacifist this land has not yet seen, and one that it
will be difficult to refuse to hear. What they will
have to say about the Churches will be painful, and
difficult to answer. But unless human nature is
going to be altered tremendously, we may assume
that the men will come back mostly as they
went out, all sixes and sevens, only more so;
most of them holding their pre-war opinions only
more violently, a few converted to their very oppo
site and now determined to get those opinions
adopted; namely, furious militarists and fanatical
pacifists. Facing up to a complicated situation like this
is generally inhibited by the declaration that the re
turning army will demand from the Churches, at
88

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
least, "reality." We were never more under the
dominion of catch words and phrases which refuse
to yield the slightest intelligible meaning on serious
analysis. And this may be one of them, for it has
become as universal and wearisome as "doing your
bit." It will be refreshing if the men do demand
reality; it will be a revelation if they can tell us
what they mean by it. But this judgment has
been given by responsible persons at home, and
they probably mean something by it. One can
imagine that those who retain any interest in the
Churches, and have been able to think during their
time in the army, will demand that the Church
shall once for all make up its mind about its atti
tude towards war. An adverse decision was gather
ing before the war, but a good many who were
prepared to go a considerable distance in time of
peace to break the delusion of war have backed con
siderably under the pressure of events. It is likely
that there will be a demand that this line of
advance shall be for ever abandoned or only be
considered if one is prepared to travel its whole
length. A Church that preaches one thing in
peace and another in war-time will not be tolerated.
"Reality" may mean that; but if men take dif
ferent views about which course shall be adopted,
the demand for reality will hardly provide us with
a solution for our difficulties. It will only force
upon us the dilemma of reinterpreting Christ and
89

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
His Cross in terms of "righteousness in blood,"
of presenting the Kingdom of Heaven as something
that can be forced upon the world at the point of
the sword, and of expurgating the New Testament
of all that seems to suggest any other way; or, in
setting out to carry pacifism to an issue as dramatic,
as sacrificial, as venturesome as war has always to
be. It will be a difficult situation for those of us
who have confined ourselves to scholarship and
preaching and are utterly unfitted for statesman
ship or action; difficult for those of us who have
found the compromises of ordinary life worrying
and insoluble enough without having to face the
tragedies which this issue seems to hold in its
hands. One can conceive an impatient demand for
reality that will refuse to pay men merely to
preach; that will regard all worship as so much lost
time, and theology as mumbling dry bones; that
will force a kind of Christian syndicalism on the
Church, advocating an attack on the social problem
by direct action. Certainly the demand for reality
will make short work of the plea of "creating an
atmosphere," praying for what you dare not lift
a little finger to do yourself, discussing problems
that evidently have no practical issue, since those
who take the opposite positions live the same kind
of lives, vote for the same man, and fight in the-
same last ditch; passing resolutions and leaving it
90

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
to society in general or Parliament in particular to
carry them out.
The Church must. prove that her theology leads
to action by herself taking action, show that she
has authority by exercising it, display the power
of the keys by actually opening doors. She must
show that worship cannot be confined to services and
sacraments, but, because of these, she starts about
constructing life on the basis of her belief and in
the venture of her faith. The Cross must not only
be preached, it must be set forth in daring the
issues that upreared it; the Church living as her
Lord died. Those who preach the Crucified must
bear the marks of the dying of the Lord Jesus in
their bodies. The Church must not only preach
that we must love our enemies, but she herself
must do it, beginning with denominational enemies.
She must not only declare that society must be
organised on the principles of Christ, she must
organise her own society on those principles. All
this means a religion of reality, a religion of vision,
adventure and power.
It is perfectly legitimate to hope that the in
spiration to a religion of this order may be pro
vided, not by the returning armies as a whole, but
by someone who has been a member of them. The
task of building the earthly paradise may fall to
some soul who has been scorched in this earthly hell.
If God sends such a man, to whom we in
9i

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
England are compelled to listen, then it is also likely
that the blind longings and dumb desires that have
lain dormant in the armies may find in one of
their own the expression and leadership they need.
Where this crusade has been joined in the hope
that it was going to set Europe free from a great
menace (and this was the hope that inspired
thousands to endure so great tribulation of mind
and body), the very disillusionment that the lack
of political leadership seems almost certainly to
threaten may prepare men for the real objective,
the true holy war. Those who have kept any spark
of faith to the end will not demand from others
certain things to be done, but will themselves set
about the work. Just as the monastic movement
in its earlier and more heroic days attracted soldiers
to seek in the cloister what they had failed to find
on the battlefield, so the new movement, ascetic
and world-denying as it will have to be, may attract
the men whose ideals have been fired but left un
realised by the way of war. Those who have been
willing to risk all for their country will be willing
to risk no less for the kingdom of Christ. They
will not be afraid of venturesome and dramatic
acts; they will have escaped the dreadful timidity
which has paralysed modern religion. They will
not be unready to pay the price of unpopularity
and endurance. Given a leader, and there will be
thousands of men who will be willing to follow,
92

THE DEMAND FOR REALITY
and it is not unlikely that he may be in the trenches
at this present moment. But let no one suppose
that he will bring a revival of the merely calefactory
order, leaving us all warmed and comforted; it will
be a revival of the religious life as a campaign, a
battle, an adventure, not in some mystic sense, but
in reality.

93

II
THE CHARGE AGAINST THE
CHURCHES
What has been happening to Churchless Chris
tianity during the war? Even where a belief in
Christianity had been sustaining itself during the
great controversial period which preceded the war,
it was marked by a non- and even anti-ecclesi
astical character. Even with many who continued
their attachment to the Church there was a feeling
that the Church was not necessary to Christianity,
indeed was a hindrance. It was common to meet
with the declaration that there was more Chris
tianity outside the Churches than within them. To
explain the prevalence of this idea would need the
gathering of considerable material and a very care
ful sifting of its value. But in the main two things
have contributed to its existence. It is part of the
natural conclusion of Protestantism. Once it is
allowable to separate from the main body and make
a Church of those who agree with you in protest,
then there is nothing to prevent that process being
carried on until the individual protests that he can
get on without a Church at all. So much can be
conceded to the Catholic charge that Protestantism
94

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
is a slippery slope on which there is no legitimate
stopping-place short of the bottom. But there is
no doubt also that the Catholic claim that there is
no salvation outside the Church is the very cause
of Protestantism. Human nature being what it
is, any exclusive claim sets up a counter-claim, and
the spirit of men will always prefer to take risks
with his soul the moment he is told that he will
perish if he does. These things have probably
operated more subtly but more drastically than the
general discontent at the action of particular
Churches or particular individuals in the Churches,
which one would generally find given as reasons for
leaving the Church. For there would be less weight
given to corporate slowness or individual bad be
haviour if it was felt that, nevertheless, the Church
was a necessity; there would be more patience,
more attempt at reform from within. Moreover,
it has got to be said very plainly that if some indi
viduals are really in a position to condemn the
Church and have proved it to be impossible, many
more have been proved to be impossible by the
Church. There is no greater testing place of
character, especially of the disposition which is able
to work with others, than the fellowship of the
Church. And it may be said of many with all
charity that, while we' recognise their other excel
lences and the justice of many of their charges
against the Church, they went out from us because
95

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
they were not of us. Some stones cannot possibly
be builded into a Church until they have been hewed
and shaped and polished somewhat. While making
all allowance for the charge of obsolete theology,
irreligious ideas of worship, and general compromise,
that can be made against the Church, any experi
ment along more advanced lines will soon prove that
we are not down at the real objection. As a general
rule, it is fair to state that the more advanced a
Church is the smaller is its attraction. This is not
to be taken to prove or disprove that the line of
advance is wrong; but it does disprove the idea that
there is any large mass of discontent which arises
simply from these causes alone. It will not do,
however, to fling off to the conclusion that the age
is unspiritual. The trouble is not so deep as that
either. But we are living through a time when
spirituality conceives itself to be independent of
and corrupted by anything external; the taste of
the times tends to reticence in religion sufficient
to make a man shrink from even the confession
that is entailed in going to Church; and, above all,
the modern mind is exceedingly restless and liable
to boredom. On the whole, we may safely con
clude that the misunderstanding and lowering of
the Church idea is the chief cause of Churchless
Christianity, and that Protestanism and Catholicism
are jointly responsible for the deterioration that has
taken place. 96

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
There were hopeful signs in the few years pre
ceding the war that some revival of the Church
idea was at hand. Not only was the attraction of
the Catholic Church beginning to reassert itself
upon quite unexpected minds; persons drifting over
to Roman and High Anglicanism, who were con
stitutionally opposed to anything that would limit
their freedom, but who, nevertheless, were prepared
to put up with considerable discomforts if they
could feel themselves in an institution that was em
bedded in history and deep in the secrets of com
mon human nature; but there was growing up in
both Catholic and Protestant quarters a disposi
tion to justify the Church as Divine not by mere
fiat so much as from its human necessity. Apostolic
Succession is only a rather crude form of expressing
the fact that life must flow from one soul to another
in an unbroken succession. The doctrine of "no
salvation outside the Church" is simply a rather
harsh way of saying that human personality cannot
exist without social contact. The power of the keys
is only a special intensification of the power that is
bestowed on all corporate life. It is not suggested
that these explanations exhaust the meaning of
the full Catholic claim, but they do provide avenues
of advance towards an understanding of what it may
be striving to express.
In Nonconformity, especially, external pressure,
in the shape of the need for stopping a serious
97

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
defection towards Churchless Christianity, and some
thing more deserving of being traced to internal
inspiration, were operating towards the discovery of
a statement of the need and power of the Church
which was having an ever-growing attraction for
the new generation of Free Churchmen, and
seemed destined in time to embody itself both in
a doctrine and example of the Church which might
have gone far to solve the problem, and gradually,
perhaps, to bridge over the gulf between Catholi
cism and Protestantism. These, then, were the
pre-war conditions. What is going to happen after
the war? It would be easier to discern the possi
bilities if we could gauge what has been happening
during the war.
Surely there must have come to all genuine un
attached Christians a sudden revelation of the utter
impotence that their position involves. The war
was launched upon us by the dispatch of a tele
gram, and the pressing of a button mobilised armies
for destruction. The forces that make war were
ready and only needed a single word. The masses
of the people nowhere wanted or willed this war,
but they were helpless, not only because the war
system was ready, but also because the opposition
consisted of vague desire and was composed of un
related units. The forces for peace were not ready
for mobilisation. If only there had been some
organisation with its plans as well prepared, it is
98

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
agreed that the situation might have been saved.
If there had only been a Church! There was; but
it was distracted, divided, and was everywhere
easily stampeded by national danger. The inherent
righteousness of our cause will not explain the
facts of the Church's acceptance ; because that would
not explain the precisely similar conditions in the
enemy countries; because there has never been any
opportunity for the Church to meet and deliberate
according to its own peculiar methods; and because
it is perfectly obvious that the Church was caught
up into a machine by the frayed fringes of its
garments. The Church will always be a prey to
this sort of thing until it has a mind of its own
and a body to express it. The peculiar righteous
ness of this war, as far as our side is concerned,
does not explain the situation. There has always
been found a Church to bless or a religion to
sanction every war that there has ever been.
If the Church could have stood together on its
own ground at the outbreak of the war it might
have won back thousands of deserters and might have
enormously shortened the war. It is as useless as it
is easy to mourn over what might have been; but in
this case it is not unprofitable to back-prophesy a
little. If only there could have sounded forth
from the whole Church a distinctive message! That
this is not the impossible demand of an ecclesiastical
idealist or the complaint of a disgruntled pacifist
99

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
may be discerned from the fact that such a typical
person as Mr. H. G. Wells seems to have spent
some time in the first incredible weeks meditating
among the tombs of a village churchyard, recalling
the fact that in every town and village in England
there was a similar building dedicated to the same
purpose, and wondering why there did not go
forth from this mighty and mysterious institu
tion some great word of light and leading.1 Mr.
Wells confessed to a yearning for some reconcilia
tion with the Church, which he had always rather
despised, and in the anguish of the first days of
the war he came very near to saying the great
word himself which he evidently had wished the
Church to say. But the hour passed, and while
men were getting their thoughts into shape, a few
praying for light, many more reading their news
papers, the whole country was being swept by the
hypnotism that war always brings.
This is not the place to say what that message
ought to have been; for no private person can do
that. But the Church ought to have sought a
message. There ought to have been an immediate
gathering of the leaders of the Church, sessions
of prayer and discussion, a time of waiting and
IConferring. There was hardly any instinct to
prompt this, strangely enough, and what attempts
1 See Mr. Wells's articles in The Nation in the opening months of the
war. IOO

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
were made soon showed that men were gathering,
not as members of the Holy Catholic Church, but
as citizens of the British Empire. One never real
ised until then how utterly the Church idea had
been destroyed even in the minds of those who
made most profession of it.
There must be very few, even among the most
convinced and enthusiastic supporters of the war,
who feel that the Church has come out of this trial
at all worthily; except, of course, those unfortunate
leaders who always have to defend what has been
done or resign their office. But there is no sign
whatever that the Church has a distinctive outlook,
a distinctive policy, or a distinctive message. It
can only emit a solemn Amen to the decisions of
politicians. Never was it manifested before how far
the secularisation of the Church had gone. The
absence of any real light on the situation may be
discerned by the most charitable student who cares
to unearth the official pronouncements of Bishops,
or the resolutions of Nonconformist Assemblies. It
is obvious that the Bishops have been reading the
newspapers ; and nothing else is at all obvious. The
Official Church pronouncements remind one of
those forms prescribed in popular law books for
drawing up wills: "While deploring . . . Chris
tianity . . . righteousness . . . assuring his Majes
ty's Government . . ." The rest does not matter.
All this can be defended, has been defended in
IOI

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
passionate speeches, in showers of pamphlets, and
in scores of, one trusts, ephemeral books; but is
there anyone who doubts that the net harvest for
the Church will be an increase of contempt?
The poor parson, as always, comes in for a fair
amount of ridicule and abuse; probably the less he
deserves it the more he gets. It is pointed out how
some of them have been compelled to change their
tune. The noticeable fact is gloated over that they
play the new tune much better than they did the
old. At last there is no lack of something to preach
about. The pulpits ring with denunciations of sin
— of the German type. Quite right, no doubt, but
somehow it is not very reminiscent of the Prophets
to condemn the enemy at a distance, who can
neither hear nor answer, and praise the audience
close at hand. And now what eloquence in the
appeal, what passion in forcing it home, what a
clear and unmistakable challenge, what a wealth of
persuasion — to join the army. Such are some of
the things that have been said in bitterness even by
those who support the war, but somehow feel that
it is a little incongruous to be so much more
efficient in defending the Government and recruit
ing for the army than in setting forth Christ and
winning men for His cause. Bernard Shaw says
the Churches ought to have been closed for the
duration of the war. It is a rather drastic sugges
tion, and it may be dismissed as characteristic of its
102

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
author, but it would not have done so much damage
to religion.
The belligerent parson is felt to be an anomaly
by nearly everyone. If he feels like this, why does
he not go and fight? The question has been
debated in our newspapers with a feeling which
shows it is a vital issue. The Church of England
clergy are relieved by a decision of Canon law;
they are forbidden to fight unless by the consent of
their Bishop. It is said that a great many have
asked permission, but have been refused. Non
conformists have been left to consult their own
conscience, but very few actually in the ministry
have gone. When conscription came, all clergy,
ministers, and most theological students were ex
empted. There is no doubt that this exemption
has done harm. What has been felt can be
gathered from the temper of Parliament when the
question is discussed, and the very large vote at the
Trades Union Congress in favour of the exemption
being removed. A defence has been made by the
High Churchman on the line of priestly vocation,
and if one accepts the idea of a distinct priestly
caste perhaps there is nothing more to be said; the
Broad Churchman has based the rightfulness of
exemption on the ground that the minister is the
official of an international society. Why this should
not apply to a member of the international
society no one can see. Everyone realises that the
103

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
disqualification of the priesthood rises from the idea
that the priest is the typical, the representative
Christian. It is a difficult problem if one wants to
be fair to the whole situation ; it has been immensely
relieved by the Military Service Acts. Whether
this is going to help us in the future is another
matter. It is continually being said that it is the
patriotism of the priests in France, their share in
the common task and suffering, which has helped to
change the attitude towards religion in that country
since the war.1
But it ought in fairness to be said that there
have been a few men in the pulpits of all denomina
tions who have refused to change their convictions
according to circumstance, and some whom this
present issue has convinced of the absolute opposi
tion between Christianity and war. Many of these
have had rather a rough time both from their con
gregations and from their denominational officials
and assemblies. It may well be that some of these
have only themselves to blame; they may have been
tactless, impossible and offensive. But the guilt and
timidity which a more circumspect utterance has to
display is even less worthy of praise. Perhaps, on
the whole, the pacifist parson deserves most blame.
For it has to be said of the "bellifist" that he
allows little restraint or fear of the future in this
or any other world to check him; while, if the
JIt is apparently forgotten that they are conscripts.
104

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
pacifist really said what is burning within him, he
would be out of his pulpit in one week and in prison
the next. On conviction, the bellifists have it.
What in the way of extenuations will be pleaded
by either side after the war remains to be seen. But
no one has yet dared to prophesy that the Church's
attitude is going to bring to her a harvest of souls
and the grateful support of the nation as a whole.
It will almost certainly mean a further alienation
of the intellectuals, the expulsion of the advanced,
the bitter contempt of the working man, a glorious
time for the atheist and secularist, the increasing
indifference of the masses.
Yet, even so, it is not a hopeless situation; be
cause, while this is the natural conclusion to which
everyone must be forced, there are other things
besides natural conclusions to be reckoned with in
this matter. Perhaps what is most hopeful in the
situation is the agreement of the different denomina
tions. The one exception is to be found in the
Society of Friends, who have maintained their
traditional opposition to war, although not perhaps
in such an arresting or effective manner that they
themselves feel particularly proud about it. An
isolated attitude at this time may be condemned
by the conforming as "superior," but that is not
how most of those who have had to preserve it would
describe their own feelings. On this question
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Nonconformists,
105

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Unitarians must bear together whatever praise or
blame is forthcoming. There is nothing to choose
between them, whatever view you take. And we
say this is hopeful. What we have been wanting for
centuries is a hearty and wholesale repentance of
the Church. It has been said that only a repentant
Church will at last win the world. What has kept
the Churches back from repentance has been the
possibility of comparing themselves with other
branches who have sinned more. Now at last God
has concluded all under sin, perhaps to have mercy
on all; for if there is to be a repentance now, there
is some chance that it will be a real repentance.
But it will be denied by the defenders of the
Church's action that there is anything to repent of.
But even the Anglican Church knows better. The
leaders of the National Mission have been careful
to state that the Church is not to be asked to
repent of her support of the war. On the con
trary, according to the Bishop of London, the
National Mission was to gain a million more men for
army and to enable the nation to keep on to
the end.1 But the Bishop of Carlisle has been say
ing that if we were really Christians this war would
not have happened.2 It is no use carrying the matter
further now, but there will be some stern encourage
ments to repentance after the war. The Church
1 Speech at the Guildhall, September 26th, 1916.
"The Christian World Pulpit, October 6th, 1916.
ioS

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE CHURCHES
has made a big bid for the gratitude of the world;
she will find that she has not gained it; and when
she turns to seek the "Well done" from her Lord
there may be something else to be listened to. We
shall have to face the question why we did not
at least maintain that there was always another
way with God, and why we didn't inquire what it
was; why we did not concentrate upon the duty
of forgiveness and the putting away of hate and
vengeance; why the people were not encouraged to
pray for universal deliverance. The Church could
at least have shortened the war. But the doctrine
that there can be no peace until the enemy is
utterly crushed will, if persisted in — and one does
not see how anything else is possible unless we are
all going to eat our words — bring European civilisa
tion to the dust and the Church of the West with
it. Yet even from the dust the Church may arise.
For with her there is always the capacity of re
pentance if the Lord cares still to knock at her door.
It rests with His righteous judgment and His mercy
for the world. But it is possible that the great fall of
the Church may be the one thing that is needed to
bring her to final fidelity; for it will mean the re
examination of her history, her claims, her doctrines,
down to their very foundations. There can never be
the half-and-half attitude again; whatever else is still
open, compromise is now impossible.

107

Ill
THE DISCONTENT WITH
SECTARIANISM
As soon as we begin to dream of the possibility of the
Church coming to repentance and so to resurrection,
we are bound to wonder what that risen Church will
be like. It has always been recognised that the
Church must be holy; but the holiness which is to
mark the Church of the future must not only be
manifested in the high devotion of its worship, in the
constant production of the typical saint, that adven
turer in the realm of the spirit; but there must be a
definite separation from the world. The problem of
how to keep a distinction between the Church and
the world was the inspiration of the Puritan revolt in
the seventeenth century, when an endeavour was
made to construct a visible Church which should con
sist only of saints in the New Testament sense,
namely, those who had been created anew by faith in
Christ. This demand was made over against the
Anglican idea that the Church is simply the nation in
its ecclesiastical aspect, and against the Catholic idea
that the Church consists of all the baptised. The
attempt to adjust the National Church to this de
mand was found to be impossible, and then began the
108

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
separatist movement as the only way of realising the
Puritan ideal. Without going into the experiments
that were made, or discussing the various theories of
Church membership that were tried, surely almost
everyone who has lived in any of the separate systems
will be found ready to acknowledge that no method
of constructing a Puritan Church has yet been found.
In the end the tests that are proposed come to be as
formal as the submission to a rite or the recital of a
creed. It is impossible to discover whether a man
has been through the great experience from any
willingness or unwillingness to confess that he has,
and we have to descend to a judgment on the man's
character and life, which is perforce an assumption
on the part of his judges, and may be quite unfair to
the man; and in actual practice the standard that
comes to be applied is one of mere respectability.
There is no doubt that the general tendency has low
ered the significance of the Church, and there is now
little to choose between Puritan and Catholic
Churches. The most enthusiastic denominationalist
would hardly dare to maintain that his Church was
holier than others, that it produced a greater number
of saintly men and women ; he would fear the charge
of bad taste, Pharisaism or inaccuracy that would
certainly be forthcoming; and yet the attainment of
a higher stage of holiness is the only possible justi
fication of denominationalism.
One wonders if it is some unconscious recogni-
109

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
tion of this fact that, despite our rival systems and
the claims we make for them, the world has no
patience with our sectarianism because it can see no
difference between the different denominations, and
resents our claim to holiness because it can see no
difference between the character and attitude of
Church people and those who are outside. If that
judgment has ever seemed unfair, it has plenty of
evidence on its side now. All the denominations
agree about the war, and here the Church takes
precisely the same attitude as the world. The
barriers between one another, and the barriers be
tween Church and world, are seen to be quite unreal.
Whatever be the real significance of the world's
condemnation of our sectarianism, there is no doubt
that it is one of the commonest popular counts
against the Church. How can a worldling be ex
pected to believe in the Church? He immediately
wants to know which Church. And it is simply
futile for any Church to imagine that because it
claims to be the one and only that this at all im
presses the worldling. In differing degree they all
do that, and the arguments used make no impres
sion, because the worldling sees that we are all alike
when it comes down to practical decisions. Our
creeds and systems may differ, but in this world-
crisis all Churches are alike, and they are just
like the world. Why should the worldling come
over to us? It may be, therefore, that his gibe at
no

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
the multitudinous sects of Christians has not arisen
so much because of our internal divisions, but be
cause of the more fundamental delusion that there
exists any division between us and the world.
Yet perhaps it would be well to assume that the
frequent condemnation of sectarianism is of itself
worth some consideration, before we turn to the
condemnation of exclusiveness. It is obvious to
ourselves, and it must be obvious to the world, that
the Church can give little help to the mighty tasks
of rebuilding international and social relationships
when it has not solved these problems for itself.
There is not only the fact that the great divisions
of Catholic and Protestant can be perceived to run
in national groupings, but it only needs closer
observation to discern that denominational differ
ences seem to run according to social grades. It is
a common complaint among Nonconformists that
when their sons get on in the world they pass over
to Anglicanism, if not in the first generation then
certainly in the second. And in Nonconformity
itself it would certainly be found that the differing
denominations each represent a different average of
social condition. If the outsider means that it is
because of this that the. Church must solve its own
differences before it attempts to dictate to the
world how to solve its problems, then the condem
nation of our sectarianism is valid.
It may be, however, that it is just the spectacle
in

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of a host divided against itself that moves the
modern complaint, when the necessity of alliances,
coalitions and united action are so apparent. No
Church can be expected to act together in time of
crisis if in more peaceful times it has become so
broken up and separated. How can such a Church
speak with one voice or express itself in the kind
of action that is needed at a time like this? Per
haps a few may recognise that "national" Churches
constitute a danger to humanity; though in the up
rising of the national spirit that war has brought,
even if this were recognised, it would hardly be
made much of at present. It is here, as elsewhere,
only possible for most of us to recognise how dan
gerous to the peace of the world the "nationalism"
of the Lutheran Church has been. That judgment
overlooks the attitude of the professors who sit
fairly loose to Lutheranism, and the fact that the
national attitude dominates Roman Catholics in
Germany just as strongly; and, of course, over
looks the nationalism of our own Churches and es
pecially of the one that qualifies its Catholicism by
"Anglo." It is to be feared that in war-time the
prefix qualifies the substantive out of existence. We
know now some things which "Catholicism" does not
mean when our friends use it with such unction and
superiority. It is when we come to the proposals for the
union of the Churches that we find the popular
112

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
denunciations of sectarianism wear very thin. The
plea of toleration sounds very soothing to those who
have had to fight to obtain it. At this demand
from without the Nonconformist may pride him
self that the man of the world has come to see
what is right in our contention, which only confirms
our sense of injustice at the high Anglicans refus
ing to admit the validity of our orders, that we
are Churches, or that we possess the Sacraments.
Axe we sure that this judgment from without means
anything at all? First of all, there are plenty in
Nonconformity who don't believe in any orders
save those which they issue themselves; who make
less and less of the Church and the Sacraments.
How can they resent the Anglican refusal to admit
that we possess what we regard as worthless? And
does the world's conversion to the doctrine of
"toleration" at all represent the true Noncon
formist spirit? If Nonconformity has simply come
to mean a claim that everyone should be allowed
to worship as they please, and should be recognised
as Christians without further controversy or con
tempt, then some Nonconformists have a long way
to go yet, for they will not extend that kind of
toleration to Anglicans or Romans. But should we
be satisfied if Rome and Canterbury altered their
present attitude towards us and we all continued to
go on in our own particular way? Do we admit
that in Christ's Church temperament, climate, up-
113

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
bringing are the only guides? We may have come
down to that idea; but that has always been the
world's attitude when it has given a thought to re
ligion; it has not moved up to us at all.
But most suggestions go further than this. They
propose reducing all the denominations to their
lowest common denominator, abolishing all insist
ence upon distinctive points and finding some all-
embracing compromise. Sometimes proposals of
this nature go even further than lowering the de
nominational differences; they even propose that all
differences shall be done away with between Chris
tianity and the other religions. We have had from
even exalted quarters since the outbreak of war the
recommendation to unite on the Fatherhood of God
and the Brotherhood of man. How it is proposed
to get any enthusiasm for these nebulosities does
not appear; for it is to nebulosities that these terms
must be reduced unless we can have some con
crete idea of the nature of God and the measure
of man. These proposals ignore the fact that re
ligions get their inspiration not from the things
that are agreed by all, but from the things where
they have a distinctive message. That such pro
posals should be put forward now is disappointing
indeed. They have been made before in less neces
sitous times, and wherever they have been attempted
they have failed to waken any enthusiasm or accom
plish anything for mankind. If the world is going
114

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
to be helped now it must be rather by some dogmas
that really mean something.
The complication of denominationalism works
out disastrously at the Front. We get the exclusive
claims of Anglicanism exciting ridicule and anger
there, and, on the contrary, there is the closer agree
ment found possible between the various schools of
Nonconformists. Is not the verdict from the evi
dence that Nonconformity provides a basis for un
ion? We may get the fact that the Y.M.C.A. has
provided a platform on which all denominations can
speak put forward as an indication that the
Y.M.C.A. provides the right basis of union. Even if
one could reconcile oneself to the fact that the type
of worship provided at a Brotherhood or Y.M.C.A.
meeting was the ideal thing, is there anyone alive
who imagines that the Catholic Churches would ever
condescend to that position? and are there even many
Nonconformists now who would like them to?
There is a place for the Brotherhood type of meet
ing, a very large and valuable place; every Church
ought to be thankful for the common platform
that the Y.M.C.A. has provided during the war,
and will continue, it is hoped, to provide after the
war; but it is quite another thing to believe that
it would be good if these were the only types of
worship provided.
It is to be sincerely hoped that there will be
no attempt to follow these will-o'-the-wisps; for they
"5

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
will only lead some of us into a religious swamp
and exalt the counter-attraction of a city with walls,
a city with light and hearth fires to welcome.
It is a proposal of far more value when it is
suggested that the Churches should unite together
for specific purposes on which they are agreed, such
as Purity, Social Reconstruction, the Observance of
the Lord's Day, Temperance, and — one wishes one
could add — Peace. This is not only of practical
importance, but it may have a far-reaching effect.
It is not suggested for a moment that federation for
these practical and peripheral objects can satisfy any
true conception of the Unity of the Church; but it
has already been found that through such knowl
edge of one another as federation for these pur
poses brings there is bound to come an increasing
respect, the longing that we might come to an
agreement on things which are far more important,
and at last be able to worship together the One
Lord whom at present we must worship apart.
There is a line of approach which requires such
patience, and seems to be so inevitably slow that
many turn aside from it in impatience, but which
it is possible the war may speed up, both by in
tensifying the desire and quickening the rate of
progress. It is across the deepest ditch that divides
the Churches, namely, questions of historical suc
cession, orders, governments and sacraments, that
reconciliation has to be reached. The recognition
116

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
that it is through the difficulties we are to seek har
mony is itself a hopeful sign. It means an assurance
that the problem is going to be taken seriously. And
it is not too much to say that already an appar
ently hopeless situation is slowly yielding. There
is not only the proposal for the World Congress
on Faith and Order which is actuated by the de
termination to face up to the most difficult prob
lems, but there is a growing appreciation that there
is no great stand made on these points that does
not represent some vital religious interest; and there
fore it is our duty to try to seek out, not the error
which we can so easily discern, but the truth which
alone could give strength to the position. There
are fewer people who now think that every Roman
is simply scheming to reintroduce the Inquisition,
or that every Anglican is concerned only with out
ward forms. There is growing up a mutual appre
ciation of the forms which other people use in their
worship and the distinctive thing for which each great
branch of the Church stands. It only needs another
stage of understanding to be reached to see that to
have different denominations to preserve these dis
tinct customs and different points of truth is not
really serving the cause of truth at all. These things
in isolation do not serve any useful purpose ; for they
do not correct the Churches that are without them,
and the distinctive witness of each only absorbs too
much attention and produces an unbalanced type
117

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of Church and Christian character. It is beginning
to be felt that the things for which the different
denominations stand ought to be fused together into
one Church, when the balance of truth would be
gained and a real comprehensive Catholicism be the
mark of the Church. It may be that the war will
quicken the recognition that this is the only real
remedy for the discerned evils of sectarianism and
generate some great movement that wili fling down
the barriers. But it ought to be recognised that
nothing but a passionate ideal for a Church in
which all these differences have been resolved and
all the contributing parts have been given full repre
sentation will provide either the inspiration or the
true basis for reunion. One could wish that there
were more signs of this recognition and desire. Even
the war has not shaken us out of our complacency
with sectarianism, save in so far as we see the thing
makes for inefficiency; we have not yet realised its
spiritual dangers and how it is hindering the coming
of the true Catholic Church.
What about the other objection to the exclu
siveness of the Church? It is felt that the Church
draws a line between itself and the world which it
has no right to draw, and that it draws it in a way
that is absolutely unreal. The Church demands
the confession of certain Creeds or of a certain ex
perience; and these demands cut out those who
claim that they are just as good Christians. This
118

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
is reasonable enough, however difficult it may be
to see what the remedy is. Everyone ought to see
that it is no use pretending to have a Church unless
it has a mind of its own and stands for something
distinct. What the better kind of outsider com
plains of is that the Church puts forward certain
tests which prove nothing. Many profess the Creeds
who do not evince the slightest proof that they
understand what they profess or realise what the
confession commits them to in actual life. It is
easy enough for men to profess to have had a cer
tain experience of religion when once the phrase
ology gets current; and suggestion itself may in
duce an unreal experience. But these are matters
capable of adjustment wherever there is sincerity on
both sides. For even if the Church has not found
the right test for belief or character, it is becoming
clearer that the understanding that she does stand
for certain things has been of great value. If the
Church had not been rigid on some matters a
witness of the greatest value would have been lost
to mankind. The witness has not always been made
in the best way or expressed in the clearest terms,
but history has shown that the Church was often
committed to truth whose abandonment was de
manded by what proved to be only a temporary
and superficial phase of thought.
But some go further than this and ask that the
line between Church and world should be entirely
119

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
effaced; in fact, that the Church should cease to
be a distinct body at all. Surely everyone can now
see that the attempt to erase this line of demarca
tion has been only too successful; but instead of
the effect being to lift the world to the level of
the Church, it has only brought the Church down
to the level of the world. It would be cynically
amusing, were it not so tragic, to find The British
Weekly still maintaining that the methods of the
Church must be different from the methods of the
world,1 when that paper has been foremost in advo
cating the Christian sanction of the world's way of
war. There is every right to demand the wiping out
of even the faintest line of separation if the Church
has been right in agreeing with the world that the
war is the only way out of our present troubles.
But surely it is the retracing of that line and the
rebuilding of a very high wall that is at present the
greatest need of the Church and the one hope of
the world.
There is a line along which we may reach a
reconciliation of the Church's imperative need to
preserve distinct her constitution and message, and
the demand which comes from the man who finds
himself shut out by the impossibility of confessing
a certain creed or experience. Let it be under
stood that the Church was created by a certain
experience and stands for certain things, but let
1The British Weekly, Leading Article, August 10th, 1916.
120

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
the gates be opened wide for those to come in who
desire the Christian experience or who want to be
reckoned members of the Church which stands for
such and such things. And then let us trust the
power of the Church to keep burning at her heart
in the saints she creates and the theology she puts
forward a fire which will purge out all undesirable
elements and continually attract those who desire
to appropriate the Church's faith. This means
abandoning creeds as tests, but it also means re
taining them as great historic affirmations of the
Church, which still guide her thought and express
her faith on matters once challenged.
Then let the cleavage between the Church and
the world be made to appear not in abstract claims,
but in the Church's ordering of her own life on
lines always in advance of the rest of humanity.
The Church need not be considered as an ark in a
storm, or a city walled against hostile attack; these
similes no longer represent the true position to-day;
but we can still demand that the Church shall be
the advance guard of humanity, conscious of its
relationship to God, leading where others shall
follow. It must be admitted that it is this leader
ship of humanity that is most to seek in the present
relative condition of 4he Church and the world.
But this can probably be traced largely to the world
ly notion that the majority must rule, because that
represents the voice of God. You cannot thus
121

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
apply democracy to Church affairs, because, in re
ligion at any rate, the minority is often in the right.
It is the leadership of those who are fit to lead that
we want to secure. At present the leadership of
humanity is lost to the Church, because leadership
within the Church is repressed and discouraged.
Perhaps here we have to come to some reconcilia
tion between Episcopal and democratic govern
ment. If only the saints were chosen as leaders,
instead of the safe men, and if only when some
adventurous souls were chosen for leaders they did
not immediately grow timid and cautious! Here
is the real problem. It can only be solved as the
Church concerns herself with the manufacture of
saints and prophets, and learns to honour them,
and then we shall see the Church begin to take her
rightful position as the real head of humanity. We
need not trouble about dividing lines if only there
is movement and the right persons are at the
head. And this will almost certainly not be secured
until we have blended again the Catholic and
Protestant types of Christianity. For Catholicism
has always recognised that there must be leaders,
but has nearly always stoned those that God sent
to her; and Protestantism has always recognised
that if there are to be leaders there must be indi
vidual freedom, and yet has come down eventually
to the rule of the average and the mediocre. We
want room to grow leaders, and that means that
122

THE DISCONTENT WITH SECTARIANISM
individual liberty must be cherished as one of the
indispensable channels of the Holy Ghost. But it
must also be discovered how to trust the leadership
of holiness and love, and to abandon that based
upon the idea of military obedience. Leaders in
spiritual things must lead by reason of their power
in character and the superior consistency of life,
and we must grow a Church democracy that under
stands that no leadership is acceptable unless it
continues the Church's historical development and
is itself manifestly led by Christ.
We can see somewhat dimly how the problem is
to be solved, and we can now look round to see
which of the Churches is moving most rapidly to
wards such an ideal; for it is only such a Church
that can hope to survive the war.

123

IV
WHICH OF THE DENOMINATIONS
WILL SURVIVE?
Comparisons are odious, but we shall have to make
them. Everything is being tested by fire, and not
everything will stand the test; the most ancient in
stitutions are going into the melting pot; they will
not come out as they went in. What will happen
to the various Church embodiments with which we
are familiar in this land? Which of the denomina
tions will survive?
A good deal will depend upon the duration of
the war. The war may go on for another year
without any very profound change in our economic
basis or our social structure being thrust upon us.
The collapse that almost everyone expected at the
beginning has not come, and things are continuing
marvellously the same. The fabric of our social
order has shown itself capable of bearing such an
enormous strain without snapping, that prophecy on
these matters has already been severely discredited.
But however difficult it may be to fix a time beyond
which, if the war continues, we shall be faced with
catastrophic changes, there is such a danger point,
and once past that we shall see things beginning
124

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVIVE?
to fall in. If a testing time of that nature comes,
we can infer from history that only those things
will remain that go deepest into our common life
and minister to our greatest necessities. Then it
would probably be found that age would tell not
against, but for, the chances of persistence. Some
of our Churches have already stood the test of great
convulsions, and may do so again. Swift adapta
bility might give to others the power to tide over
the new time; but none of our present denomina
tions seem to possess such a character. Even a
great economic revolution would leave those
Churches least shaken which are oldest, because they
rest more upon real property.
But if no such apocalyptic conditions are coming
upon us it will still be found that the necessity for
the various Churches will have been tested to their
foundations, and everything representing only a
temporary or merely temperamental need will dis
appear. There may be no dramatic collapses. Some
of the smaller denominations may scrape along for
a bit and refuse to recognise that they are slowly
but inevitably dying; but though it may be a pain
ful and long-drawn-out affair, it will be found that
they contracted their last illness in this terrible
time. We conclude, therefore, that the older a
Church is the better able it will be to survive, not
only because it is more deeply embedded in the
social structure, but because its long experience has
125

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
taught it which elements in human nature are most
unchanging. It may seem strange to suggest that
a law looking so like our old friend "the survival
of the fittest" should be applied to the Church of
Christ; but all history seems to show that there is
such a law, and that it does operate even in this
realm. There is, of course, another alternative which
the operation of the law of survival also suggests:
namely, that some quite new Church will start, as
at the Reformation or the Evangelical Revival. But
even this, though for a time it may bid fair to
dominate all others, will just in proportion to its
novelty only the more swiftly decline. The very
old and the very new will have the best chance,
though time will soon differentiate in favour of
the old.
We do not propose to consider this denomina
tional question in anything like detail, but only to
confine ourselves to the main types and to those
which confront us here in our own land. The war
has raised again in a more intense form what was
an academic question with a few Anglicans, namely,
the possibility of closer relations with the Eastern
Church. The necessity of altering our opinions
about Russia now she is our ally has undoubtedly
taught us how much good we can find in something
we have been taught to fear and detest, when we
really try; and however cynical one can become as
126

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVD7E?
one reads the new eulogies of everything Russian,
it is rather a phenomenon from which we ought to
take hope. On the same measure it should not be
absolutely impossible for us to be loving the Ger
mans before long, if only our political masters tell us
that it is necessary. And the discovery that there
is so much that is mystical and popular and really
Christlike in the religion of the Holy Orthodox
Church is, after all, only an augury of What we
might come to feel about the Roman Catholic
Church, not only because of our ancient connection,
but also because of its closer affinities with our own
religious spirit. Therefore we propose to leave the
question of the Eastern Church, simply because
whatever applies to our relationship with that
Church applies still more to our relationship with
Rome. We propose, however, to discuss Anglicanism
first. It is not the oldest of the Churches we have
to consider. Rome occupies that place; but the
Reformation has accomplished at least two things:
it has made the Roman system seem alien, and it
has given us a most healthy fear and a most hearty
prejudice against any return to it.
No one can doubt that the war is going to help
Anglicanism, as compared with Rome or Noncon
formity. However much the Nonconformist may
protest that, on a statistical basis, the "national"
Church has no longer the right to its name, it is,
127

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
nevertheless, the Church which most fully enshrines
our national history and represents our national
temper. It holds the great events of our history
in its hands, clear for all to see. The struggles of
our national life, our sorrows, our triumphs, our
sins and our pride, are built into the very fabric of
our Cathedrals, Abbeys, and Parish Churches. If
"England" means to us something more than the
dear green land, something more than the genera
tion now alive; if it means our history, there is
simply nowhere where that history lives for us as
it does in the Anglican Church. A man can only
hate it if he dates the beginning of the world from
the seventeenth century and thinks Puritanism the
resurrection of Christianity after a sleep in the
tomb for fifteen hundred years; no one can for
bear to cherish some love for the Church of Eng
land if he loves England; for it is the best monu
ment of England to which he can point.
At the time of arising of the national spirit
like the present, the natural attraction of the
Anglican Church must make itself even more widely
felt. At other times, when the most patriotic of
us are always inclined to criticise our nationality,
then we are inclined to criticise Anglicanism. It
represents the national spirit in its bad as well as
in its good qualities; it is built on the system of
compromise by which we Englishmen rule our
lives; it is essentially the Church of "good form";
128

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVIVE?
it goes along with the Public School type and with
Punch. The Anglican is an essentially conventional
Church, it is the Church of all respectable people, it
is the gentleman's Church. It is snobby, squirish
and a bit feudal, of course. It is not always like the
Church of Jesus Christ, and whether it would more
astonish the Apostles or be more astonished at them
is an interesting question; but the chief thing is
that it fits the average Englishman like a glove.
It is decent, it is not fanatical, its devotion is reti
cent, and it knows better than any Church in Chris
tendom how to administer just enough religion
to keep the soul quiet and contented. It has dis
covered exactly how much religion the Englishman
can stand. It is the English Church, and that ex
plains everything.
If the Anglican Church only knew what an op
portunity it now had, it could sweep Noncon
formity out of existence. Perhaps the National
Mission showed some astute though entirely subcon
scious recognition that this was the time. There
are very few people in Nonconformity now who
have the faintest idea of what Nonconformity
means. They are quite ignorant of its history;
not that closer acquaintance with its history would
always make them anxious to continue Noncon
formists. They are Nonconformists, not by con
viction, but just like most of us are what we are
ecclesiastically — by pure accident. These people,
129

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
especially when they get touched by culture or suc
cess, are always dribbling over, and the Anglican
Church ought to be able to sweep them in by
thousands now. Then there are the people who
never go to church at all. At this moment millions
of them are in the army and will come under the
influence of the Anglican system. There are the
great national events, the celebration of some great
leader's death, the observance of Intercession days;
all these must sweep up the fringes of our religious
life, and sweep them in one direction — towards the
national Church.
But there are nobler things than these in the
Anglican Church, and these may attract the better
spirits without, who may now be feehng the hunger
for God. Anglicanism has never been without a
succession of saintly souls, and it has never lost
the spirit of earnestness. Ever since the Tractarian
movement it has been producing more and more
genuinely Catholic Christians, who are not con
cerned for the Establishment, but fear it; who do
not make the English Official and his wife the
types on which they keep an imitative eye; who
are more concerned for the Kingdom of God than
for the British Constitution, and more in love with
a Universal than with an Imperial Church.
No one who knows the history of the Anglican
Church during the last century, or who comes into
contact with its best representatives, can imagine
130

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WILL SURVIVE?
for a moment that the Anglican Church is either
dead or is dying. The National Mission is the
latest sign of a genuine religious life. It has been
perhaps one of the greatest adventures that the
Anglican Church has ever made. It has arisen out
of a concern that all is not well, and witnesses to
a half-concealed uneasiness about the war being a
sign of nascent Christianity, or the soldier's sacri
fice an implicit confession of Christ, or any of that
nonsense. Many of the clerics may be saying these
things, but they do not believe them. It may be
clearly enough laid down by, some brainless prelates
that the Repentance to which the nation is called
has nothing whatever to do with the fact that we are
at war, which in their judgment is the sign that
the nation is religious at heart and is prepared to
take up the Cross and follow Christ; but there
would be no mission of this kind if this was what
the Church felt in its very soul. The Mission
has outwardly failed. It started well, but it rushed
into publicity before the Holy Ghost had furnished
either illumination or power. Yet it witnesses to
a deep concern in the living heart of the Church,
and it shows that adventure is not dead. For if
it should have succeeded; if the people had really
been touched by religion and started to pour
out penitential prayers, seeking repentance, ask
ing where hope was to be found, there is not the
shadow of doubt that unless the movement also
131

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
spread at once among our Allies on the Continent
and touched our enemies in the same way it would
have produced national disaster. If anything hap
pened which brought Jesus Christ really into view
— there crucified on His Cross — it would be all up
with carrying on the war. Therefore it was the
bravest thing that the Church of England has ever
attempted. That it has outwardly failed does not
matter nearly so much as that it should have been
thought of and attempted.
I But it is just where Anglicanism shows signs of
life, gives evidence of deep religious sincerity and
breaks beyond its national insularity, that it begins
to get dangerous to itself. The most deeply earnest
section in the Church is undoubtedly the High
Church section. Their emphasis is on the Catholic
type of religion, not on the compromise of the
Prayer Book, the Elizabethan Settlement, or the
Establishment principle. Now it is at this point
that Anglicanism begins to awaken more than per
haps it can satisfy. If we take the stiff and "spiky"
type of High Churchism, the idea that Apostolic
Succession is essential to the Church and Sacra
ments and the historic faith of Christendom must
be maintained with unyielding rigidity, then the
question is started whether one must not go further.
We know what Rome thinks of Anglican Orders
and the Anglican Mass; and on the rigid High
Church theory it seems to us that Rome is right.
132

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVIVE?
The Orders are doubtful; the Reformation Settle
ment was a break in the continuity of the Church
which all the restorations in the world have not
been able to conceal; the Anglican Communion
Service is mutilated and unsatisfying. Moreover,
even if these points could be cleared up satisfac
torily the fact remains that the whole Anglican
Church does not accept these High Church theories.
Now it is precisely these theories which, if
pressed, make some people want to go further;
either nearer to Roman Catholicism or further away
from it. There is a Nonconformist position which
has yet to be answered, one which rests on Chris
tian principle and in the light of history finds it
impossible to believe that there is this absolute
necessity either for Apostolic Succession or for the
rigid idea that Sacraments are necessary to salva
tion. It is doubtful if even Rome has the Apostolic
Succession; it cannot be proved, at any rate. It is
doubtful what religious purpose can be served by
eating the actual flesh which was born of Mary and
hung upon the Cross, even if that is what the ele
ments become after consecration; that is to say, it
is doubtful whether transubstantiation is Christian
in theory or is an actual fact. And, at any rate, re
ligion can and does live outside these things.
It is quite possible that as England gets more
Christian it will get less compromising, and then it
may be that the Anglican via media will cease to
133

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
attract at all. The Anglican claim will simply
stand at the fork of the road and will drive all real
travellers to Rome or to Nonconformity. Even if
"national" religion is attractive now, there may
be considerable recoil from it after the war. Its
treachery to Christ may stand revealed, and men
will crave an international Church. England has
been compelled politically to abandon her splen
did isolation. She no longer stands outside the
Continental struggles, merely exerting diplomatic
pressure on this side or that, or sending a small
army to take part in some quarrel. For good or
evil she has thrown her whole weight on one side
and placed her very life and existence in the balance.
It is obvious that she cannot withdraw from the
consequences of this; and she will naturally find
herself drawn also into the religious struggle of the
Continent. Our soldiers will have been brought into
touch with Catholicism as it is, not as it is pictured
either in Protestant calumnies or in Roman eulogies.
They have seen the splendid shrines of Northern
France, they have been confronted with the crucifix
until it has burned into their mind, they have seen
the common people at their devotions. The ancient
mystery, the passionate devotion, the grip on com
mon life that Rome still keeps may exert its hold
on them. Or they may think the forms mere mum
bling and superstition; some of them get very
tired of the crucifix; they may conclude that this
134

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WILL SURVIVE?
religion only inserts itself into life, does not alter
it. They, too, will come back convinced that the
dilemma clears itself like this: if Anglican, then
why not Roman, and if not Roman, then something
far removed from it?
A bold stroke would, of course, save the Anglican
Church from further decline and have enormous in
fluences on the future of religion in this country!;
but it seems too much to hope. Let the Act of
Uniformity be repealed. The Prayer Book as it
stands cannot survive the war. The Services must
be altered, the lectionary revised so as to get rid
of some of the utterly demoralising and meaning
less lessons, some of the Psalms and some of the
verses excised for the purposes of public worship,
the Eucharist remodelled on sound liturgical lines,
much more variety provided for Morning and Even
ing prayer, and a place provided for extempore
prayer. Let there be a special ordination service for
those coming from other denominations, recognising
and extending their orders. Let there be some effort
made to keep the attraction of the altar and the
power of the pulpit in harmonious balance; secure
freedom from State dictation, a system of dual con
trol for the appointment of ministers and the election
of Bishops, provision for real representative govern
ment in which the laity have a due share, and it
would not be long before the Anglican Church
began to show in outward organisation what is cer-
135

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
tainly alive and moving at its heart. At present,
however much it may wish to, it cannot move; but
it is by no means a hopeless Church; its opportu
nities are still such as no Church in Christendom has
ever had, but they must be seized now or they will
pass never to return.
It falls for us to consider what is going to hap
pen to the Roman communion. We may be sure
that Rome is going to continue. The war will not
destroy her. Macaulay's prophecy about her still
existing when the New Zealander takes his stand
upon a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch
the ruins of St. Paul's, and Tyrrel's comment that
when Rome dies the other Churches may order their
coffins, remain still true. Yet any great immediate
movement towards Rome is difficult to think of.
There is Protestant prejudice to overcome, and how
ever unfair it may be it will take a long time to
overthrow. There is the fact that it is the "Roman"
Church, and to the person who does not feel the
pull of history or the glamour of "the Eternal
City," that means that it is an Italian Church.
Rome looks alien in England, however different it
may have been in the past, and in the popular
judgment the Roman religion is not respectable.
Yet this might help a little, for after the war no
one will be particularly attracted to a respectable
Church. The issues have shown that if we are going
to follow Jesus we must be prepared to go forth
136

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WILL SURVIVE?
to Him "without the camp." And if one looks
round for a maligned, feared, non-respectable
Church one is forced to choose either some queer
sect or Rome. It is the sacrifice in becoming a
Roman that still holds power, and has given to New
man popular canonisation.
The old repulsions and the old attractions still re
main. There is her great antiquity, which, whether
it goes back to St. Peter or not, does go back to the
primitive Church which shed its blood in streams
for centuries to gain for us religious freedom.
There is her wonderful fidelity to the faith. Rome
may have added to and corupted the faith; she
has never come near denying or surrendering it.
She retains in her worship the note of mystery; he
is a poor Christian to whom the Mass makes no
appeal with its unbroken representation of the sac
rifice of Calvary offered every day on countless
altars through all these changing centuries un
changed. It is the Church of the saints: Augustine,
Francis, Catherine; the Church of the mystics:
Julian, Thomas a Kempis, John of the Cross; it
was the spiritual home of Dante, Pascal, New
man; if she has sometimes persecuted her sons,
none but she could have borne them: Abelard,
Savonarola, Luther; a Christian must want some
inheritance in a Church like that. And even if it
prescribes the form somewhat rigidly it keeps alive
a passionate devotion; if it has surrounded the
+37

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
figure of Jesus with crowds of saints that seem to
us to stand too near Him, and dispute our adora
tion, Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the living
heart of its religion, and it has never doubted that
He should be worshipped. With all its call to an
asceticism that some would judge out of place in
genuine Christianity, with all its theological rigidity
and its imperial pride, it keeps a large heart for
common humanity, and is the last Church in the
West to retain the poor. One would consent to
tramp many tortuous paths to come at the living
founts they lead to, submit to many disagreeable
things when it offers us so much that is food for
the hungry soul, put up with the rough, iron-bound
casket for the sake of the jewel it contains.
But one has to weigh against this the history of
cruelty and intolerance, the stubbornness and blind
ness, the scandalous lives of many who were vowed
to holiness, and of more who were admitted to the
highest place. One has to consider the exclusive
priesthood, the excommunicating spirit, the claims
of the Papacy, the gross mixture of doctrine that
has to be accepted as a whole simply because the
Church teaches it. Above all, there is the military
spirit which has crushed many a fine soul, the legal
bondage that cramps the intellect, the intrigue that
has disillusioned the honest, and the spy system
that has broken many a heart. It resolves itself
into a struggle of the heart against the head, the
138

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVIVE?
past against the future, food or liberty; and which
ever way one decides, it divides a man against him
self. The great question is whether the war will
make any difference. An idea is being proclaimed
in some quarters that the war is the logical outcome
of Protestantism and a divided Church. Martin
Luther is made responsible for the modern Prussian
spirit. He ruthlessly trampled on things he had
once himself regarded as sacred, he made the
Church in Germany subservient to the State, he
told the nobles to shoot the peasants down; and
the end of all that is the rationalism, the brutality,
the atheism of modern Germany, with its sole faith
in Might, its doctrine of the State as superior to
moral or religious considerations, its utter in
humanity. And it is all due to Protestantism.
We must simply record on the other side the
Kensitite verdict that the war is due to Vatican
intrigue and the Pope is at the bottom of the
whole business; and the philosophical idea that
Rome, with its militaristic government, its great
faith in externals, its exercise of arbitrary power,
feeds militarism and leads to belief in war. These
opposite opinions may be left to exterminate one
another like Kilkenny cats.
To come to a more reasonable judgment. It
is held that the attitude of the present Pope is
going to make a serious difference to the future
.139

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
hold of the Roman Church over the Continental
nations. The Pope's refusal to preach a "holy war,"
to protest against the invasion of Belgium, to de
nounce the atrocities of the Germans, shows him to
be the worst kind of coward, and reveals the utter
moral degradation to which the Papacy has at last
been brought. If against this it is urged that the
Pope had to remain neutral, that it is not for him
to judge, and that from the day of his accession
he has never ceased to urge counsels of moderation
and appeal for peace,1 then it is maintained that
the neutrality has simply been an attempt to white
wash the other side, and that his appeals for peace
are nothing more than dishonest attempts to play
the German game.
It is no use arguing in the temper of the hour;
we shall not be able to judge the matter clearly
until the war is over; but if anyone will take into
consideration the fact that the Pope pleaded for
peace at the beginning of his reign, when the
Central Powers were at the height of their success,
that these appeals have been based upon the highest
grounds of humanity and religion, and have been
expressed with a concern and feeling that it is im
possible to suspect of insincerity; and if we try to
think what the general verdict upon the behaviour
of ecclesiastics will be when the war is over, it is
not beyond* the bounds of probability that it will
1 "The Pope on War and Peace."
140

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WILL SURVIVE?
be recognised that the Pope was the only Church
leader who played a worthy part and has remained
true to Christian principles. And no one can doubt
that the Pope has risked the prestige of the
Papacy tremendously by taking this line, and that
he must know it. His speeches have been sup
pressed, explained away, and his advice simply
ignored by the great mass of those who owe him
obedience. It may be that he will utterly fail to
influence the situation, that he will not even be
represented at the council to settle the peace of
Europe, that there may be serious national defec
tions, especially in the case of Belgium; and that
the Papacy may perish. But if it perishes through
faithfulness to Christ and humanity it will only be
to rise again to new power.
What is more important to decide is whether
there is any chance that Roman Catholic religion
will be altered by the war. What many have been
feeling about Rome at this time is that it is pledged
more than any other Church to certain fundamental
principles and practices of Christianity, and that its
internationalism has compelled a certain attitude
that we look for in national Churches in vain. In
the tremendous battle that we have to face on the
sacramental meaning of marriage, the prevention of
birth and the call to chastity, we have to look to
Rome to maintain the full Christian ideal unalter
able and set it forth in its most drastic demand. But
141

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
is there any hope that Rome is going to interpret
her position in any other than an imperialistic,
legal and military fashion? It may be that we are
starving for some things that Rome holds, but does
it mean the loss of all liberty as the price of obtain
ing them? One feels like a mouse looking at the
cheese in a trap: it looks like cheese, it smells like
cheese, it must be cheese; but there is this unnatural
and uninviting arrangement of hooks and wires and
springs which rouses our fears and suspicions. It
is not that we are demanding that there shall be a
Protestant Reformation of Rome. There are many
things in the spirit of Protestantism that we desire
to see for ever excluded. What one wonders is
whether there might not be some change in spirit,
giving to the doctrines a humane significance, mak
ing obedience no longer a legal affair whose
breach was to be visited with pains and penalties,
reforming the spirit of the hierarchy and the claims
of the Papacy on lines of service, making the Pope
a true "Servus servorum." The Pope has seen
this war as few have seen it. If only this drove him
to take action to prevent war in the future, the
Papal infallibility which is such a sore difficulty
with many of us might come to be interpreted as
at least a providential error. Just suppose that the
Pope was now to declare it to be not allowable
for a Christian to fight! The Pope has expressed
desires which show that he has some other feeling
142

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WILL SURVIVE?
for the Christians who are not in communion with
the Roman Church than that they are simply
schismatics and heretics; he has declared that he
regards them all as his children at a time like this.
Will he not attempt to make that real by recog
nising that the great schisms of the past were not
due to sin and rebellion, but to religious needs
which were being unsatisfied, and make provision
for the freer forms of worship and expression to
exist alongside the unchanging forms of centuries
and the Church's determination to abide by the faith
committed to her? Some rather enigmatical sen
tences are to be found in some of the speeches of
Benedict XV. which might be taken to mean that
the claim to temporal power was to be abandoned;
while on the other hand they might be taken to
mean that the Pope was demanding that he should
have some neutral territory over which he would
be temporal prince ; x which looks like the States
of the Church back again. A rumour has been
spread from some Catholic sources that the claim
to temporal power is to be abandoned, and that
the Vatican and the Quirinal have already settled
their differences since the war began. One's heart
quickens at the suggestion, and all sorts of forgotten
dreams come back to mind. Dante's prophecy might
be fulfilled, the White Pope would be here at last,
and the successor of the Blessed Peter would show
1 "The Pope on War and Peace, " pp. 8, 20.
143

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
by his life that he was prepared to imitate the life
of the humble fisherman to whom he owes his dig
nity, and by taking up the cross can prove himself
worthy indeed of the name Vicar of Christ.
It will seem in the opinion of many wildest folly,
if not treachery to freedom, thus to dream of what
changes might yet come to the Roman Church.
But we claim the right to regard that Church, for
all that makes us to sorrow and stumble at her
present condition, as at least a true branch of the
Church of Christ; and because we hold this we
must allow that she may be revisited by Christ and
reformed according to the principles of the Gospel.
It may be from the most unlikely quarter, as
Protestants would judge it, that the great revival
of religion will come; and until Rome is revived
and brought back to the pure apostolic spirit there
is little hope for the reunion of Christendom and,
therefore, for the conversion of the world. We
therefore dare to hope and pray for the Mother
Church of Christendom and for her Supreme
Pontiff. We turn last of all to discuss what effect the
war will have on the Nonconformist Churches. It
is difficult for one who owes to them nearly the
whole of his religious life, most of his ideals and in
spirations, a vast circle of friendships and the free
dom of a hundred pulpits, to criticise the Noncon
formist Churches without seeming to lack all sense
144

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVIVE?
of gratitude. But it is because of their past history,
because of their superior illumination on many
points, that their present attitude seems so deplora
ble. We expected nothing different from the Catho
lic Churches with their past record and their re
ceived teaching; we expected nothing better from a
Church which owes its very existence to the State,
but we did expect something different from Non
conformity. We had always understood that the
deepest principle of Nonconformity was not so
much nonconformity to the liturgy or government
of another Church, but nonconformity to the world;
that we did not demand freedom from the State
just for convenience, but because we had seen,
however dimly, that the Kingdom of Christ is
destined to supplant the State. The Catholic
Church has always recognised the theory of the
two swords, though it has always kept the way open
to a higher judgment by its absolutist demand that
the Church must be the superior state because it has
the spiritual sword. The Anglican and Lutheran
Churches have always been more or less Erastian;
though we recognise among High Anglicans espe
cially a growing desire to be free from the intoler
able conditions this involves.1 While they hold to
their characteristic positions, however, they are
bound to support the State when it is committed
to war. But the Free Churches, maintaining that
JCp. "Churches in the Modern State." Dr. J. N. Figgis.
145

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
the Church must be left free from State control,
have always been critical of the area over which the
State has the right to rule. On the question of a
State-dictated form of worship the Nonconformists
have been willing to rend the Church of Christ in
these islands into fragments. But when the State
has decided that there is now no other way to save
the world but to go to war, to crush the enemy,
to conscript our manhood for this task, and to
take away many of our ancient liberties, the Free
Churches have decided that nothing must be done
to break the unity of the State, and that conscience
must be entirely ruled by the idea of the safety of
the community. It may be urged that the Free
Churches stand where they do because they are con
vinced that in this struggle we have righteousness
on our side, that God has called us to this task,
and that this is our present way of bearing the
cross. One need not dwell on the fact that before
the war many Free Church leaders would have re
garded any such conclusion ruled out a priori. And
even if we must believe that it was not fear or
hurried judgment that has compelled them to
change their convictions, we have the right to in
quire what this change of opinion really entails.
Surely no one of them thinks for a moment that
this is a circumstance that is never likely to happen
again in the history of the world. All idea that
this tiresome compromise of Christian principles
146

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WDLL SURVIVE?
would only have to be accepted for an unprece
dented emergency which would never happen again;
in short, that this was to be a war to end war; of
all that little is now heard. The Free Churches
must abandon once for all their toying with non-
resistance, the martyr nation, and other ideas of
like character in which they have indulged in the
past, and must stand side by side with the other
Churches and with the typical German doctrine that
when we come to matters between State and State
the principles of Christ do not apply. Not only
so, but they must go on to recognise that this is
a point on which individual conscience must not
be allowed a decision. First conscription, and then
the penalising of those who resist on conscientious
grounds has to be admitted. For the sake of con
science a man may split the Church, but he must
not split the nation. He may decide that he will
rather leave the Church than use a certain Prayer
Book, but he may not discuss whether he ought
to kill. This shows what our relative values are.
What seems perfectly clear is that the Free
Churches have lost their raison d'etre. It is no
hesitant prophecy that after the war they will find
that the public has discovered that their noncon
formity is superficial and their freedom a shibboleth,
and they will be left to wilt and wither away. The
real principle of Nonconformity was not being un
derstood by us in any deep fashion before the war,
147

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
and our freedom was not being used in order to
follow Christ more perfectly. Nonconformity had
become simply a determination to be unlike certain
other Churches and its freedom a political rather
than a religious principle. Some Nonconformists
have followed their principles, and as a consequence
there are more Nonconformists in prison to-day
than at any time since the Toleration Act was
passed; only this time they are cast off, suspected,
brow-beaten, sneered at by those who have actually
manufactured them.
If only Nonconformity could have stood clear
to its witness that, whatever the circumstances,
Christ's was the only way to redeem the world,
that, whatever secular politicians might judge, w£
know that God has in His resources a better way
than this, and, without necessarily resisting any of
the acts of the Government, had called the people
insistently to prayer that God would reveal His
will, not only would Nonconformity have been
saved, but Europe might have been saved, and it
would have fallen to the Church of Christ to lead
the people to deliverance. If this had happened it
would then have been profitable to discuss whether
Nonconformity might not become more united,
whether along its own lines of freedom and spirit
uality it might not adopt those practices and beliefs
which keep Catholicism alive and have been so im
mensely strengthened by the war. It is our con-
148

WHICH DENOMINATIONS WELL SURVIVE?
fident belief that Nonconformity could evolve the
truest Catholicism: mystical, not magical, sacra
ments, representative priesthood, and corporate pos
session of the keys of the Kingdom. There would
have been a great deal of prejudice to fight against,
a certain stubbornness of temper, a blindness to
certain inalienable elements in a full religion and a
rich worship, but it looked as if with patience these
could be overcome. But now these things hardly
seem worth fighting for. The Catholic Churches
are now more likely to get reformed on Noncon
formist lines than Nonconformist Churches are to
get Catholicised: for it is almost certain that it will
be the Catholic Churches which will break on the
subject of the war first; the Pope's attitude and
the National Mission are signs of that. We do not
wish to shut out the possibility of a supernatural
revival; but we cannot conceal the fact that as far
as Nonconformity is concerned we have little human
hope. It is a thousand pities; it may mean de
laying the full Christianising of the Church, it may
mean that for many a generation we shall have no
choice between a crude faith and a crude unbelief,
a rigid and mechanical Catholicism and a superficial
and secular humanitarianism.

149

V
THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
The war has presented us with a new word,
"pacifist." It has been born in obscurity, hailed
with contempt, branded as illegitimate. It ought
to be "pacificist"; but we are in a hurry. The
pacifist must give no occasion to the enemy to
think that he is stuttering, and the enemy wants
a word that can be uttered with short and con
temptuous dismissal.
Now pacificism, or pacifism, as it has become,
is simply the doctrine that one ought to make peace
when one can; and with that few people in this
mad world would disagree; with the exception of a
few retired military men afflicted with dementia, and
a few journalists who, in the endeavour to serve the
demands of their employers and attract the notice
of the public, have worked themselves into a state
of perpetual delirium. But like most other doc
trines nowadays the profession of pacifism contains
little guidance for practical application. The best
security for peace is efficient preparation for war;
that has been the application of pacifist doctrine
that the plain man has always patronised. And
150

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
this war has not shaken his faith in his deductions.
For if only England had been better prepared there
would have been no war. Germany would not
have dared to spring her base designs upon the
world, or risk a rupture with us. And after the
war this deduction is to rule more thoroughly. We
must be prepared to face any coalition against us.
It may occur to a few of these persons, after a
time, that this is an endless game, since other
nations will be playing it too. Then there will be
a movement towards a League of Nations to keep
the peace by the threat that if one attempts war
all the others will fall upon it. Whether such an
idea is sound, or would not lead in the end to the
same conditions as rule the world now, remains to
be seen.
A more idealistic type of believer in peace as a
desirable and possible thing thinks that we have
only to win the present war and the chief obstacle
to a world peace will be removed; until the Central
Powers are beaten there can be no peace, and there
fore the practical problem entirely depends upon
our success in this war. This person believes that
once the military power of Germany is broken the
great lesson will have been learned not only by Ger
many, but by every other nation; this will never
be attempted again. He does not seem to see that,
on the accepted theory that Germany has made an
unprovoked and wicked attack upon the peace of
151

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Europe in order to seize the rulership of the world,
there does not seem any reason why some other
nation should not one day act in a similar manner.
If it is sin that explains Germany's designs, then
sin is a fairly universal phenomenon; if it is mad
ness, you can never be sure that anyone will always
remain sane.
But the person labelled "pacifist" to-day must
be taken to be one who does not believe that prep
arations for war can ever secure peace or that war
itself achieves any real benefit for humanity. He
looks upon war itself as a madness, crime, or sin.
This judgment upon war had been growing for
half a century, and was beginning to attract the
attention of thoughtful and religious people.
The writings of Tolstoy have had a wide circula
tion and have exerted considerable influence, partly
because of the moral idealism and partly because of
the intellectual force of his gigantic and arresting
personality. Although Tolstoy uses the Gospels as
the text-book for his doctrines, it is not on any in
fallibility of Jesus, or on the acceptance of the
Christian faith concerning Him, that he bases his
appeal. Jesus simply happens to have uttered the
ultimate morality on this and kindred questions.
The idea of non-resistance has been worked out by
Tolstoy to its ultimate conclusions, and especially
to a condemnation of all government by force;
landing him eventually in a position of anarchic
152

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
communism. It is the attempt to govern others
by force that has corrupted the heart of man. Tol
stoy has convincingly set before the world in his
books, pamphlets, short stories and novels the moral
iniquity that is involved in compulsion; not only
in the injustice done to the governed, but in the
evil effects it has upon governors and in the general
futility to which the whole system works out. What
perh,aps he has not shown is whether this is really
due to compulsory government in itself or to the
human frailty and sinfulness of governors. His
literature is mainly critical in its effect, and he has
left nothing to show that the mere cessation of
government would solve the great human problem.
But what Tolstoy has done is to make the world
familiar with the idea that, for those who have any
ethical consciousness at all, moral questions must
take precedence over the mere preservation of social
order. And everyone can see that the teaching of
Jesus rests upon a similar principle and the tragedy
which overtook His career was due to His fidelity
to this principle. Those who hold that considera
tions of social order and public safety come first
must agree with the policy of Caiaphas and approve
the death of Jesus in the interests of good govern
ment and public welfare.
It may well be that Tolstoy is not a reliable
commentator on the Gospels, and he is certainly
far away from orthodox Christianity; but he has
153

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
forced us to look at the Sermon on the Mount
again, which we had been reading so complacently;
he has shown to multitudes that Jesus is the one
teacher in history who still matters; and the issues
he raises are not to be answered by saying that
there is something else besides the Sermon on the
Mount in the Gospels, or that Christ was more than
a teacher. Anyone can see that it was the Sermon
on the Mount that brought Jesus to Calvary, and
that the dilemma presented to all successive ages is
that the world has either to run itself on the lines
of the Sermon on the Mount or crucify Christ and
His followers. Tolstoy may be inadequate, and he
could not himself carry out his own teaching, but
he has sent thousands back to the Gospels, and has
shown these documents, over which the Church
had solemnly gone to sleep, to be alive with the
most pointed attacks upon the whole basis of what
was passing for Christian civilisation.
Whether it is due to Tolstoy or not, theology
has been compelled during recent years to consider
what Christianity means when applied to social
order and international affairs. The idea that Jesus
legislated on such matters no scholarship can allow;
but there can also be no doubt that He did enunciate
principles of religion which must be applied to the
whole of life if we are going to escape His terrible
denunciations against all hypocrites. No idea that
He was really indifferent to questions of economics
154

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
or politics can live under the light of present Gos
pel study. What signs of indifference He dis
played to particular points are only due to the fact
that He was never content until He had penetrated
to the root of the problem. This has been forced
upon us slowly, it has had to make its way against
valiant attempts to show that Jesus preached a
purely inward religion or mystic indifferentism, but
it is now becoming a universal admission that the
teaching of Jesus does not sanction the existing
order of economic competition or international war
fare. He certainly preached indifference to those
who were suffering under the evils of these systems;
that is to say, He does not for one moment allow
that you cannot enjoy the peace of God under the
worst of conditions; but what He does show is that
you cannot profess to be in contact with God and
be the author of such conditions. It is quite a
unique point of view, and we have not yet been
able to express it in intellectual form or set it forth
in our life. But any idea that Christianity can be
confined to the inward or private life is now only
defended by the hypocrites who want to make
profits out of the present system and yet retain an
inner peace now and reach heaven hereafter, or by
those scribes who are suborned to bolster up the
doctrine of the divine rights of the State. If the
world is going to attempt Christianity it now knows
what the conditions are; it must construct a new
155

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
social order, and it must find a better way of set
tling differences than by war.
The intolerable threat to which civilisation is
exposed, the burden of ever vaster preparations for
war entangling all peoples in a fatal web of sus
picion, intrigue and panic, the interweaving of a
diplomatic and military system which, touched at
any point, will hurl destruction upon innocent and
unoffending people, has become a shame and scandal
from which mankind must be freed or all progress
be abandoned. War involves moral degradation,
not only because of the deeds it demands, for which
man has to call up his savage and animal instincts,
but because of the hate, trickery and false witness,
without which it cannot be conducted; war de
thrones reason and makes religion sheer hypocrisy.
And the best thinkers of our times have done their
best to devise schemes to banish this disgrace from
the world; so far all in vain. It has at least begun
to dawn upon Christian people that perhaps Chris
tianity, here as elsewhere, holds the clue to the
world's redemption. About the total opposition
between Christ's teaching and the way of war, few
thinkers, uncorrupted by the worship of the State,
have now any doubt. The difficulty is how to apply
the teaching of Christ to international affairs, how
to give the principle by which He lived a national
embodiment. Some may content themselves with
creating the atmosphere in which war shall eventu-
156

THE PERELS OF PACIFISM
ally perish, spreading abroad the knowledge of what
Christ stood for, and showing how His cross was
the solution He chose when this problem presented
itself to Him; but sooner or later the pressure of
circumstances, or some inner conviction, reveals
that truth is spread quicker by example than by pre
cept. Others may look for some diplomatic device
or legislative measures to remove the main causes
of war. But those who have entered most deeply
into the spirit of Christianity, who have discovered
that it is not only a unique message, but sets forth
a unique way, begin to be aware that some closer
following of Christ, which entails bearing the cross,
may be the only way to save the world from this
crime which so deeply stains the conscience of man.
And so, before the war, quite respectable thinkers
began to wonder if this nation was not called upon
to abandon its defensive preparations and trust
itself to the protection of God.1 What the results
of this might be hardly matters. It might be that
the example would fire the imagination of humanity
and start a new rivalry between the nations for
adventure along these lines. It might be that some
designing enemy would take the opportunity pre
sented to seize our government and destroy our
liberties, or that some barbarian people might utter
ly devastate our lands and put the defenceless pop-
*The Rev. William Temple, at the Liverpool Students' Conference,
1912. See "Christ and Human Need," p. 64. The Rev. Dr. Mackennal,
Address to the Free Church Council, March 13th, 1900.
157

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
ulation to torture and the sword. This might prove
the nation's Calvary, but it would effect the world's
salvation and be followed by a, glorious resurrection
of the nation that was willing thus to suffer for
the sins of the world. It is clear enough that this
idea has come to stay, however long it may be
before it is acted upon, and it may find a prophetic
utterance which shall form the minds of men until
the Redeemer-nation is born.
A third influence has been that of International
Socialism. The' idea that the proletariat of all
nations are more closely bound together by their
common interest than to their particular nation and
government has been sown broadcast among the
workers of the world. If they have enemies they
are not to be reckoned among the wage-slaves of
other nations, but in the capitalists and employing
classes of their own. The doctrine has been advanced
that all wars are economic in their origin, are
engineered by the possessing classes for their own
enrichment, paid for both in blood and taxation
mainly by the working classes, and always entail
their further degradation. Evidence is not wanting
that sometimes astute rulers have welcomed war in
order to divert the workers from their own suffer
ings and their dangerous aspirations; and, even
where no such motive can be suspected, once a war
is set going those in power seize the opportunity to
cancel the hard-won liberties of the lower orders and
158

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
to get them to accept conditions which, after the
cessation of war, will remain and keep them from
revolt. In pursuance of these doctrines, Socialism
was preaching the class war as the only war with
which the workers should concern themselves, organ
ising itself on an international basis, and was begin
ning to discuss the practical measure of declaring a
general strike whenever war broke out ; which would
not only prevent it being waged, but would prob
ably bring all the machinery of government into
their hands. Some of the continental Socialists,
fearful whether such a movement would really prove
international when the strain came, refused to con
sider such a proposition, but it is evident that we are
here faced with an idea that will grow and may
one day be attempted; with what results remain to
be seen.
All this pacifist opinion was sporadic, inchoate,
held only by scattered individuals, and the war fell
upon it with shattering effect. Individual moral
convictions, the Church and the International, went
down under the strain of a previously unconceived
situation. For individuals the war presented the
apparent dilemma, not between right and wrong,
but between two kinds of wrong, one of which they
were forced to choose. For us in this country there
was not only the question of self-defence, but the
question of the defence of a nation that was being
ruthlessly crushed and of another which was being
159

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
seriously threatened. The best of men were torn
between what they felt to be a personal sin for
themselves, the slaying of their fellows, and stand
ing by while they watched their fellows being slain.
It seemed to the majority who thought the matter
out that it was better to risk even one's soul than
let someone else suffer. For institutions like the
Church, which had never made up its mind on this
subject, and the International, which had not per
fected its organisation, nothing but a complete
surrender or an absolute debacle was to be expected.
Moreover, it is such an unprecedented war; whole
nations are in it; there are literally no non-com
batants; in some form or other, so absolutely is the
national energy directed to one end, everyone is
willy-nilly contributing towards its prosecution.
So some have gone to the battlefield clear that
they have gone to sin against their most sacred
convictions and do deeds that they know will have
some awful result upon their souls, but with some
sort of hope that this time the world has to be saved
by sin. Many belonging to the Church and the
International have gone further than this; they
have confidently proclaimed that somehow this war
is going to set up the International and establish
Christianity. Some extraordinary somersaults have
been performed both by Labour leaders and by
Heads of Churches ; some things have been said that,
in all charity, can only be described as treachery to
1 60

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
the causes they represent; but it is perhaps for
tunate that these two forces, which looked as if
they were drifting into permanent alienation and
hostility, have been tumbled into the dust together.
A few in all these classes have stood to their
convictions, believing that circumstances do not
make any difference to principles of this kind. The
moral objectors to war in general have discovered
many political arguments which show, that their
moral judgment has not misled them in their oppo
sition to this war in particular. The repudiation
of the idea that either Belgium or France consti
tuted the cause of Britain entering the war,1 the
advocacy of seizing this opportunity to capture the
enemy's trade, and the proposals for an economic
war to follow the cessation of military hostilities,
furnish the moral objector with quite sufficient
support for his suspicions. The Socialist objector
sees the war being used to pile up profits for the
great combines and wealthy employers, to destroy
the rights of trade unions, and to bring about the
industrial slavery of his class. The religious objector
finds a melancholy confirmation in the fading of
all the original idealisms of the war, the disillusion
ment of the soldiers, the spread of vice, and the
dying down of all religious inspiration.
For some this standing to their original convic
tions has only incurred the odium which is the
1The Times, Leading Article, March 18th, 1915.
161

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
reward of those who express unpopular opinions;
but for many objection has involved them in
dangerous resistance to the law of the land. With
the characteristic compromise and bungling which
seem to distinguish all our efforts at governing our
selves, exemption from military service was first
granted in order to meet the case of those who had
a conscientious objection to killing men or to taking
any part in the waging of war, and then tribunals
were set up which were certain to show themselves
incapable of deciding what a conscience was, or
would only delight in attempting to destroy it if
ever such a faculty could be discovered. Although
this provision for exemption has been made, the
Tribunals have seen to it that very few exemptions
have been allowed. Many cases have been allowed
no exemption at all; the majority have been allowed
exemption from combatant service only, and some
have been allowed exemption on condition of obtain
ing work of national importance. If the whole
thing were not so tragic, it would have provided one
of the most comical interludes in our rough island
story. Texts have been bandied about, an aston
ishing ignorance of the Bible, and even of the
nationality of Jesus Christ, displayed, and, as we
might have expected, hardly a glimmer of what
Christianity means. A good deal of browbeating,
sneering, and abuse has characterised many of the
courts, and the "conscientious objector" has found
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THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
himself faced with all the hatred, fear and contempt
which our kind generally metes out to those who
think differently from the rest, or, indeed, set
themselves to think at all. The effect of refusing
exemption to some of these men has been to sub
ject them to persecution of varying degrees; some
of them know what it feels like to be under sen
tence of death, and hundreds have found themselves
making an acquaintance with prison life. The
general impression is that they are cowards,
shirkers, lunatics and freaks, who have sheltered
themselves under an unfortunate clause in the
Military Service Act. Some have counselled de
portation, others shooting, a great many disfran
chisement. Cowards very few of them can be. In many
cases they have not only had to face bullying and
torture, but what must have been far worse to bear,
the hostility of their friends and relations, the jeers
of their comrades or fellow disciples, the general
contempt of the nation. Obstinate a good many
of them may be. There are those who refuse to
do anything simply because it is commanded them.
Even where there is some sympathy for the posi
tion of those who refuse to take any part in killing,
those who will not undertake work of national
importance are looked upon as nothing but im
possible persons for whom no kind of penalty is
too hard. It does not seem to be recognised that
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
many of these, the most despised sect of objectors,
care nothing at all for exemption, but only wish
to protest against war with all the power that is
left to them, and therefore will do nothing that
helps its prosecution. They are no doubt dangerous
persons — persons who, if they were left free to go
about, would stop at nothing to bring the war to
an end, whatever the results might be. Others
detect in the alternative service that is offered them
simply a means of organising the nation for war or
for furthering industrial conscription. Some feel
that the work on which they have been previously
engaged is their vocation, which they will not sur
render in order to do some task for which they
are unfitted and to which they feel no call; but
only the parson is allowed to have a vocation at
this time. And it must be remembered that over
the whole scheme of Work of National Importance
there hangs the suspicion that the chief object is
not to help the nation at all, but to penalise the
objector; in its operation it is often reduced to a
mere farce. Men are being taken from work which
they can do, and which is of national importance,
and put to work which is sometimes of less import
ance, and which they can only do very badly.
Similar and other objections apply to Red Cross
work under military organisation, which may not
be openly stated at present.
It might be interesting to inquire who these
164

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
conscientious objectors are. By far the larger
number are Quakers or Socialists, many of the
latter professing no religion beyond their Socialism
and some avowing themselves agnostics or atheists.
Outside these there are Christians of all the main
denominations, the Free Churchmen taken together
far outbalancing the Anglicans and Catholics taken
together; and there are considerable numbers from
the Plymouth Brethren, the Particular Brethren,
Christadelphians and Millennial Dawnists, and a
few still more obscure sects which would be quite un
known to the general reader. It would be simple
to assume that we have here nothing but the product
of the sectarianism, freakishness and individualism
which have run riot in this age. This would be
unfair. Many of them are simple and sincere
Christians who take their Bible very literally, and
who can therefore cling to one text as a sufficient
guide, even if others seem to contradict it. Others
may be described as intellectuals, men with able and
logical minds, who have been trained in our univer
sities or in the various working men's educational
movements. Some of them have arrived at their
convictions by what can only be described as a
profound interpretation of what Christianity funda
mentally means. They are not all poor, uncultured,
or unaccustomed to higher social life. But they
are all out-and-outers, the uncompromising type,
persons who cannot bear inconsistency or com-
165

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
promise, who take their faith seriously. That many
of them have been through a great spiritual experi
ence is obvious from their calm determination, their
inward illumination and* the religious joy that they
have attained under persecution and imprisonment.
Leaving out the atheist and agnostic section, the
remainder, taken as a whole, are startingly like any
collection that could have been made of the early
Christians. They are mostly of the poorer and less
educated classes, with here and there a man of real
distinction and birth amongst them. Many of them
are very literalistic in their Biblical views, especially
on the subject of the Second Coming, but others
hold quite advanced views on Biblical inspiration
and interpretation. Most of them have no desire
for martyrdom, and are just ordinary persons with
plenty of common sense and humour; others are
aflame with the desire to witness, in season and out
of season, if needs be, by suffering and death.
Many of them have not yet faced up to Nicene
Christology, and yet a few base their whole position
on the deepest conviction that Christ was God, the
Word through whom the worlds were made, and
that on the Cross there was revealed not some part
of God, but the fullness of His power and wisdom.
Many of them in their inner souls are humble and
tender, but to magistrates they appear lacking in
respect, and the superior man of affairs would sim
ply characterise their attitude as "sheer obstinacy."
166

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
Any student of early Christianity, especially of the
age of persecution under the Empire, will recog
nise the extraordinary likeness.
The whole position is inconceivable to the ordi
nary man of the world, to the ecclesiastic, to the
type of apologist who thinks that Christianity must
be tested by its complete common sense, its aid to
getting on, its production of good citizens, and its
manufacture of nice, reasonable people. Yet what
has to be faced is that this type of person is going
to be produced in ever larger numbers so long as
civilisation rests on its present basis; that this war
is manufacturing conscientious objectors every day
that it continues; and that if the next war happens
soon, many will be conscientious objectors then
who are soldiers to-day.
These men have got hold of a principle, discov
ered by all religion under persecution, namely, that
if men are willing to go on paying the ultimate price
they can break down any tyranny or compulsion
that is imposed upon them. For those who are
willing to pay that price we have to look to the
simple-minded, out-and-out person, who for other
purposes may be considered undesirable and awk
ward; but liberty owes its existence to him.
The superior person ought also to remember that
no new movement has ever disturbed the moral
complacency of this world which has not been born
to the accompaniment of jeers and mockery, in
167

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
which sometimes the leaders of the people and the
rulers of the Church have joined. There is no
movement which has ever benefited humanity that
has not been hampered by those who, by faulty
disposition, lack of learning, or mistaken action,
have obscured to contemporaries its real value and
significance. The problem for these persons who are now bear
ing such reproach is whether they can build up as
well as they can destroy. Anything can be brought
to the ground by resistance; but it takes more than
that to put up something better in its place. To
the pacifist whom age, health, or the shape of his
collar leaves free to find some other way, there
falls the problem of considering the implications of
his position. It must be admitted that pacifist
philosophy breeds daily difficulties and creates a
thousand perplexities. There are not only the well-
worn questions of, "What would you have done
on August the Fourth?" or "What would you
do if a burglar . . .?" which no man can answer
until he has actually been placed in those difficult
positions; but there are also the questions of how
far one ought to take part in the government, or
the profits, or the general social conveniences of a
society which is ordered on the present war basis.
But the fact that the pacifist is driven to examine
the basis of the present social order, to question
our penal system, to suspect that our education is
168

THE PERILS OF PACIFISM
all wrong, to investigate his own disposition, is no
sign that he has landed himself in a cul-de-sac, but
rather that he is out on the main road of progress.
Happy are the people to whom this war has
brought moral pain and mental perplexity. This
is the sword and this is the fire that Christ came
to cast on the earth.
What is to be feared is that the attitude of the
Church, first to the war and then to the conscien
tious objectors who have been members of Churches,
will promote the conviction that Churchless Chris
tianity, a non-sacramental type of worship and an
unorthodox type of belief, are the only foundations
for pacifism. When it is seen that just where
religion finds the richest outward expression it
seems to lose inner guidance, and that it is pre
cisely those who believe in the Deity of Christ and
salvation by His Cross who believe that the world
must be governed by compulsion and that the blood
shed of war washes away its sin, then it is only
natural that pacifists should move farther and far
ther away from Catholic Christianity.
There may be far worse effects than this. If the
pacifists want to unite in the future for any com
mon action they must unite on a purely humani
tarian basis; or if religion is allowed a place at all
it will have to be of the most vague and nebulous
type, if all are going to subscribe to it. The logic
for many will be atheism. Where does one find
169

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
any clear insight into the utter futility of war;
where does one find those who are willing to risk
their all to stop war? Among atheists. The Ger
man Social Democrats are atheists almost to a
man ; and the same may be said of most Continental
Socialists. The few men of outstanding public
reputation in this country who have dared to criti
cise or oppose the war will hardly feel themselves
hurt if their religious position is generally described
as agnostic: men like Bernard Shaw, G. Lowes
Dickinson, or Bertrand Russell. When one sees
how the doctrine of immortality and "bright views
of death" are used to enable us to submit to this
daily murder of Europe's finest youth; how the
fading ideals of war are recoloured with the blood of
Christ; how false hopes of what war can accomplish
are encouraged by pointing to the Cross; no one
can be surprised if it comes to be thought that
Christianity is the greatest obstacle to the deliver
ance of man from bewildering superstitions and
misleading ideals. If for the moment the war has
enabled men to accept again the doctrines of sub
stitutionary sacrifice and redemption by blood, it
is greatly to be feared that Christianity will have
to pay heavily in reaction when the war is over.
What men have felt about the doctrine of the
Atonement for decades is that it is meaningless, and
Christ's death unnecessary. The attempt to make
the war an illustration of the necessity for the Cross
170

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
will only deepen that feeling when we look back to
see how unnecessary this war was and how little it
has accomplished for humanity.
Yet there are a few, of whom the writer must
count himself as one, to whom the war has lit up
Christianity to its very depths, renewed their faith
in Christ as the absolute truth about God and man,
shown that the way of His Cross is the only wis
dom and the only effective power for the redemp
tion of the world, and quickened the demand for
that one Church of many members which shall be
His Living Body here on earth. On all such there
lies a heavy burden of perplexities to be solved and
of implications to be explored, for which few will
feel themselves equal; but it may also prove that
obedience to the simple conviction that war is a
sin in which they dare not take any voluntary share
will lead to further light and point the next step
which humanity must take to come nearer to God.

171

III.— THE HOPE OF THE AGE

THE RE-COMMENDATION OF
CHRISTIANITY
The one hope of the future is to get Christianity
understood, accepted and embodied. But those who
see that must realise the nature of the task that is
before them. It is a task almost greater than that
which faced the early apostles and missionaries of
the Gospel when they determined to bring the
Roman Empire to Christ. They were challenged
by a pagan faith already in possession and not yet
beyond capacity for putting forth fresh forms, as
Mithraism in one direction and Neo-Platonism in
another were to show. They had to overturn a
social order which was based upon slavery and the
denial of human rights to all save the noble and
governing classes. They had to overcome the
marvellously organised and ruthless power of a
semi-deified State. We have to face conditions
strikingly similar. Everyone who has studied the
early centuries of our era has remarked upon the
many features which our own age seems to repro
duce. We have the same sort of conventional, offi
cially recognised religion, a religion practised solely
for its social advantages, maintained because of the
175

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
sanctity with which it invests the established order,
but one out of which there has departed all sense
of reality or personal claim. We have vast masses
of our people without care or concern for any kind
of religion; feeling that if it is true it has nothing
whatever to do with them and no help to bring
them. And we have swarms of new faiths and
strange superstitions clamouring for recognition and
competing for those dissatisfied alike with the re
ceived religion and with the general religious
indifference. In the early days of the Roman Em
pire Oriental religions were being welcomed, the
mystery cults were attracting myriads of worship
pers, and the search for health was being identified
with the search for God and truth; in our days we
have exactly similar phenomena in the attempts to
introduce Buddhistic doctrine to the West, in the
revival of a pseudo-mysticism, and in the Christian
Science movement.
Christianity had to compete in those early cen
turies with Mithraism, a religion which won extra
ordinary popularity with the army, and which for
a time ran a neck-and-neck race for the conversion
of the Empire, as its far-spread memorials, some
times existing side by side with Christian shrines,
remain to witness. And to-day we have to compete
with a religion which exalts militarism and inspires
the soldier. Christianity had to battle with the
humanitarian philosophy known as Stoicism, which
176

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
definitely stood for many of the truths that Chris
tianity only implied, such as the universal brother
hood of humanity; and its own witness was being
continually confused by movements like Gnosticism,
which made Christianity only one of the religious
systems and reduced its faith to an esoteric know
ledge about cosmological mysteries. Christianity
to-day has to show itself superior to the purely
secular socialisms, humanitarian pacifisms and ethi
cal movements of our times, which often profess our
applications more clearly than we do ourselves, and
yet entirely deny the need of our faith on a theo
logical basis ; and it has to be disentangled from the
maze and haze of the theosophical interpretations
which seem to attract so many minds.
Here, we say, are the same conditions as faced
the Apostles, but, unfortunately, with the addition
of one circumstance that increases all the difficulties
tenfold. The conventional religion that is still
being practised, the religion which is taking up
militarism, as the official religion of the Empire
took up Mithraism, the religion which whole sec
tions of the people have abandoned, is identified by
name with the very religion that we want to pro
pagate. When it is known that it is Christianity
we are preaching we shall be met with the declara
tion that Christianity is obsolete, has failed, is the
conventional religion of Imperialism. Especially
when it is discovered that it is no new interpreta-
177

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
tion of Christianity that is being offered, no esoteric
mystery, no diluted and dissected faith, but that
which is both original and orthodox, that which is
both primitive and the permanent heart of the
historical development of Christianity; a Christian
ity that does not propose to get on without Christ,
or the Cross, or the Church; then we shall find that
we have to cut our way clean through dense mis
understanding, lead for consideration against minds
closed against the very subject that we want to
re-open, send a shaft of light through suffocating
fogs of confusion.
If anyone is going to attempt to re-commend
Christianity to our generation, he must first recog
nise the facts and the magnitude of the forces
against him. The Church has been plodding on,
barely holding its own, but comforting itself that
there was a good deal of religious influence to which
it could appeal and a general religious knowledge
which it could assume; and all the time there has
been growing up a population which is simply
pagan without the culture or the gods of paganism.
While guides who conceive themselves to be broad-
minded have always been comforting us that out
side the Church there is perhaps more genuine
religion than inside, it has only needed this war
to reveal that the ethic of Christianity has been as
utterly repudiated as its theology, the very senti
ment of Christianity, whose dregs we could once
178

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
find in our popular novels, melodramas and songs,
completely drained away. And in this crisis the
Church has been showing that war may be a Chris
tian duty and patriotism is really religious; while
all the time the methods which war has to adopt
have been shedding every vestige of chivalry, hon
esty or humanity, and patriotism is settling itself
more and more on a purely secular basis, its motives
revealing themselves to be mainly commercial and
its inspiration no longer love of one's country, but
hate of one's enemies and fear for one's skin.
The prospect is depressing in the extreme.
Nothing can relieve it but a second Pentecost, one
of those great revivals of religion which lift the
mass mind on to another level. But we must do
something to assure our souls that this is not an
impossible desire. A revival of religion cannot float
itself into existence except on a basis of reality;
even the fire of the Holy Ghost cannot fall upon us
unless there is something for it to feed upon.
Now there are two elements in the situation
which, when considered, are full of hope. We
must recall what was the pre-war condition of
thought on the subject of Christianity considered
as a reasonable embodiment of truth. It is fair to
sum up the situation broadly as follows. Science
had withdrawn its veto against religion. We had
been emancipated from the nightmare of a mechan
ical and deterministic universe, and the idea of free-
179

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
dom had been rehabilitated by physical scientists at
work on their own subjects, who found that the me
chanical scheme was neither a true explanation nor
would work if it were. Psychologists were beginning
to dare to speak of the soul, and to discover from
the brain itself that man must be more than brain;
while many of the discredited phenomena which
have always been recorded as accompanying great
religious movements were shown to be at least not
impossible. The study of history on naturalistic
lines, as of a series in which man was only an effect
and not a cause, has had to be abandoned; and the
economic interpretation of history was relieved of
its deterministic colour by the discovery that
economic laws were not something innate, eternal
and automatic, but simply the laws which man
makes. The inhibitive idea that we can only move
safely when we move slowly, and that the realisation
of all our great hopes for social reform and moral
uplift must be postponed to a remote future, was
broken up by the discovery that in biology life does
sometimes leap forward with great strides, and that
in history religious leaders have been able to lift
mankind to sudden heights from which it never de
clines quite to the old level again.
Philosophy was beginning again to cast its vote
on the side of Christianity, not, as formerly, with
the patronising admission that Christianity was a
crude and symbolical embodiment of the truth which
180

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
was to be found more truly expressed in great ideas
and abstract generalisations. Truth was to be
found in life and movement, of which thought is
a mere symbol and rational ideas a static abstract.
The only adequate expression of truth was a unified
personality fiying a victorious life. These ideas had
been fighting their way against the old philosophic
systems, and have not yet reached their great con
structive epoch; but it is easy to see which way they
point. If truth is correspondence with ultimate
reality, and personality is the only truth, then ulti
mate reality must be personal and the universe
becomes a system of personal relationships. But
that is what the Christian religion has always main
tained, imagining God not only as personal, but
as a perfect unity of personalities, and His only
reflection here on earth a society built round a
personality at once Human and Divine. If
philosophy does not identify Jesus Christ as the
truth, it at least tells us that it is no use looking
anywhere else for the truth save in a perfect per
sonality. The field is clear for Christianity.
And we have had a world example of what the
alternative is. At present the conclusions to be
drawn have not been realised, because with the one
sided view that military hostilities create and the
fighting spirit has to adopt, we can see the example
only in one nation, that of our enemy. This judg
ment is partial, uncharitable, but it has elements
181

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of rough truth about it that are valuable, and only
need applying all round to smite the modern world
like the Day of Judgment. No one contended that
Europe was getting more Christian, or that the
modern mind is particularly strong in faith. It is
out of such conditions that there has come this
world-war of unprecedented barbarism and sordid-
ness. If Christianity has failed to prevent it, no one
would say that Christianity is the cause of it, be
cause Christianity is conceded by all competent
observers to be a very small influence to-day. It
is generally admitted also that Germany has gone
the farthest along the road of rationalism and in
whittling down Christianity; and it is that country
that has also gone the farthest in the direction of
a real-politik which makes material considerations
determinative, and in the direction of a State doc
trine which completely rules out all moral, religious
or Christian theories as inapplicable to this area.
The State is an expression of force, and on that
plane might is the only test of right.
The world has been horrified at these doctrines
since they have been represented in the spectacle of
Germany at war. But is there really any soul so
simple as to think that these ideas have grown up
only inside the artificial boundary of the German
Empire or the State of Prussia; that they exist only
inside the round, close-cropped Teutonic head which
our caricatures represent to us as the German type?
182

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
Does there really exist any competent historian who
does not recognise that this has been the general
tendency of European statecraft for centuries? It
may be true enough that other States would re
pudiate these doctrines, that our own politicians
would avow other principles as actuating our in
ternational policy; but if it is tendency that is
measured, or if it is the practical working out of
policy that is considered, who can doubt for a
moment that all States negotiate on a basis of real-
politik, believe that when it comes to conflict be
tween State and State there is nothing but force
to decide? In effect, all countries adopt a doctrine
of the State which means that they have to consider
self -existence before Christian idealism and material
welfare before moral considerations. What has
been in the blood of Europe has come to a head in
Germany; what has been the working hypothesis
of all modern States is there frankly expressed and
brutally followed. The difference that may be dis
cerned between Germany and other countries may
be traced to the greater retention of Christian
ideas which, even if only done lip service to, do by
that much affect policy. A conventional religion
may exert some influence upon life; even a com
promising Christianity does make some difference
to character; the pious phrases of politicians are
useful on occasion if only as reminders to them
selves. The German says that when the English-
183

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
man says Christ he really means "cotton." That is
not fair. He really thinks he means Christ and
cotton in so far as they do not disagree, but even
then he will not act just the same as if he had
openly avowed that he meant only cotton.
What the war ought to reveal is that we are all
travelling a certain path, and that Germany has
got far ahead of the rest on the journey to the
abyss, and the recognition of this ought to reveal
that there is safety only in retracing our steps.
What we have to fear at present is the after-effects
of the now accepted idea that the only way to beat
Germany is to be as much like her as possible. We
have had a vast clamour going up that we shall
carry out a system of reprisals and do unto Ger
many as she has done unto us. Bishops and Free
Church leaders are horror-stricken. It never seems
to occur to them that war is a reprisal, and that the
doctrine, so widely sanctioned by the Church, that
when an idea takes on an embodiment in material
form there is nothing but force with which it can be
met, really surrenders everything to those who de
mand that it shall be met by force used in the same
way. The doctrine that when a State is at war it
has the right to imprison a man for professing re
ligious opinions that may hinder recruiting is our
old friend the German doctrine of the supremacy of
the State; only the enemy holds that in present con
ditions a nation is virtually always at war. One's
184

RE-COMMENDATION OJ? CHRISTIANITY
fear is that the acceptance of this doctrine may
prove to be for more than the duration of the war.
Indeed, a pessimist viewing the world to-day might
be tempted to think that Germany had already con
quered: she has compelled the world to fight with
her weapons and to descend to her level.
What those persons who profess horror at Ger
many have got to ask themselves is, What is the
alternative? If Germany is the antichrist, who is
Christ in this business? Punch has produced its
most famous cartoon in this war in which a picture
is drawn of the Kaiser facing some wayside crucifix.
It is called "The Two Ideals." But does the bril
liant editor of Punch suggest that the Kaiser ought
to have foUowed the way of Christ even if it meant
the cross? He ought, of course; but he would have
been the first monarch to do so.
Yet here is an illustration for aU time, if the
Christian preacher knew how to use it. This is
what the repudiation of Christianity comes to. Here
is the new religion which Professor Cramb prophe
sied that Germany would present to the world as
a substitute for Christianity.1 Here is what the doc
trine that Christianity does not apply to State
affairs ends in. If you do not like it, you must
go the other way. And it has all come about, not
perhaps of long-planned design, or as a diabolical
plot against the world. Germany has had its fools
1 "England and Germany." Cramb.
I85

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
on its thrones and professorial platforms and editor
ial chairs; it has allowed its raving militarists to
wander about loose; but there has been plenty of
room for these people at the top everywhere in the
modern world. It is a clique of madmen in every
country that have driven Europe to this. But what
has given them their chance is the diffusion of a com
promised Christianity. Once you admit that Chris
tianity sanctions war and Christ has no application
to State affairs, then Christianity has no real rem
edy for war at all. If you cannot trust yourself to
God and follow Christ's way, then you must pre
pare for war, and for any kind of war; you must
watch your enemies, you must spy out their de
fences, you must invent new devilries, and when
trouble is brewing you must be prepared to strike
first and strike hard; all else is weakness. The logic
of hell? Certainly! But it is logic; and the only
alternative must be as logical in the other direction.
Here, then, is the chance to commend Chris
tianity to mankind, for it is in the light of a crisis
like the present that we can at last see what Chris
tianity stands for. It stands for the absoluteness
of Christ. This in the past has been presented as
a purely theological issue and in terms which have
proved either meaningless or a source of misunder
standing. It may be that in essence we are fighting over
again the issue that was decided at Nicaea, that
186

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
we are fighting for the "Homoousian" -,1 yet it
will hardly do to go to the world with a word
like that on our banner. But we are clearly faced
with the practical issue whether Christ is the ulti
mate truth for this life, the truth about God and
ourselves; and whether the way He took reveals
the Divine wisdom and sets forth the supreme power
on which we have to depend. I have no doubt
myself that to secure these things intellectually you
have to confess that Christ and God are one in its
deepest philosophical, theological and ethical conno
tation. But we have to face the fact that there are
many Unitarians and Liberal Christians whose atti
tude towards Christ, especially at this time, does
make Him absolute over every sphere of life, and
yet who find difficulty with Nicene terms; while
there are millions who would accept those terms and
thousands who would die for them who do not, in
effect, aUow that Christ is supreme over life. If
the Unitarians who take this position are lacking
in logic, as I think they are, many who accept
the Nicene position are lacking in life, which is
much more serious. But it is clear, now, that if
Christ is not absolute He is of no use to us. At
crises like this we have to come down to what
we believe is real, is life, is power. If there is
something other than or outside Christ, even
if it is supposed to be something bigger or
1Hutton's "Ancestral Voices," p. 14.
I87

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
better, that something can get dressed up in
the garb of the devil. You can see this in those
orthodox theologians who are arguing that Christ is
the incarnation of only a part of God, namely, His
tender, redemptive and loving side; while beside
this there is wrath and vengeance and destruction.
One need not point out to professional theologians
that this is what is rightly called a damnable heresy;
it is "dividing the substance," for it maintains that
there are different characteristics in God and that
only some of these are resident in the Person of the
Son. What we have to seek for are terms more vital,
more ethical and more personal than those which
Nica;a used, for they are metaphysical and are
capable of being materialised. What we have to
make clear to men is that Jesus Christ, a real human
being who lived a real human life, who bore the
whole burden of our nature and faced the whole
problem of our existence, was the revelation of what
God essentially is; that this human embodiment in
Jesus teUs us all about God and His purposes; why
He made the world, and how He made it, and what
He means by it; teUs us all about ourselves, how
we are to live and how we are to understand life.
And in this revelation there was nothing second
hand, merely copied, diminished, or adapted so as
to suit the body of our humiliation and the condi
tions of humanity; but that this Jesus reveals the
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RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
wisdom, the glory, the whole nature and very self
of God; and this life of ours, this flesh we wear,
and aU the conditions that are inseparable from
humanity, were actually designed so that God should
in them be Himself and here show forth His glory.
I hold that nothing short of Nicene Christology
secures and preserves and justifies this whole way of
thinking, however inadequate or confusing its terms
may have become; and that if we are going to pro
ceed to a more adequate statement on inteUectual
lines we shaU have to go higher than Nicasa, not
lower, so as to remove any suspicion that the whole
Godhead was not constitutive of the personality of
Jesus and revealed in His life. For this crisis has
revealed that the Nicene statement can be juggled
with and turned into a denial of the real and proper
Deity of Christ. But a more exact theological state
ment is not the thing that matters most at the
moment. What we have to set before all people is
that the fuU faith in Christ is the only faith that
can save the world now, and if it is to be faith, and
not merely a theological idea, it must be an encour
agement to venture all upon Christ's absolute real
ity and power.
Faith in Christ entails a perfect combination of
intellectual conviction, voluntary choice and sense
of final certainty. Men cannot accept what appears
to be inteUectually nonsense; theological conviction
does not necessarUy move the heart; there is a sort
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of pragmatic choice which brings no sense of secur
ity. When a man chooses Christ he has to do so on
the absolute basis that Christ is what he means by
truth, and that Christ's career is what he calls
success. We have got to set forth His cross to men as
the great turning-point of history, where the life of
God in the soul of man came to a reconcUiation
and unity never again to be broken up, and never
to fail of its power untU it has made all mankind
one and reconciled every soul to God. In man as
man, Christ accepted the life and way of God at
the ultimate price ; and, in the human life of Christ,
God showed that He was God, not by virtue of
position, or by nature only, but by the power of
love able to make His glory seen through earthly
shame, and to win a spiritual kingdom far more
wonderful than any predestined or natural reign
that would have belonged to Him by Divine right.
In the cross we see God capable of any sacrifice
and risking aU for love of man.
For its action on individuals, that cross works,
not by external transaction, the benefits of which
are transferred to the individual on his accepting
the arrangement, but by begetting its own prin
ciple in the soul. The cross, to those who are
brought by faith before it, first breaks up the per
sonality by showing that the ends for which we
have lived, and the things which we have loved,
190

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
would inevitably lead us to crucify the Lord of
glory; and then what it breaks through pain it
builds again through love. The vision of what the
cross means, God's love risking all to save us from
moral destruction, makes known in a flash that we
are forgiven, for, unless we were, that love would
not have dared so much; but the building up of
the personality around the new centre may take a
lifetime spent before the cross, until it accom
plishes eternal death for the old man and endless
life for the new.
Then the cross goes on to destroy the attrac
tion of the present world-order. We see that
Christ was led to His cross by a combination of
the highest religious and moral attainments that
the world had then reached. Jesus was put to
death by the religious convictions, the social jus
tice and the popular aspirations of His times: the
Pharisees, the judicial authorities and the mob
agreed that He must be got out of the way. His
religious claims were condemned as impious and
blasphemous; His claims to power were held to
threaten the Imperial rule and the safety of society;
His way of reforming the world was discerned by
the zealots and the social reformers to go too
deep, and to demand motives that they were un
prepared to adopt. Place Jesus Christ anywhere
in history since, and He would have secured
against Himself a coalition of the Church, the State,
191

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
and Labour. It is especially ominous that these
three bodies should be agreed together again to-day;
when it happened before, it was because they were
agreed that Christ was impossible.
And yet that cross is breaking down the world-
order. It has really broken the power of the State
long ago for aU who are wiUing to bear the cross
rather than worship Caesar. It has yet to break
down the world-order in so far as it has enshrined
itself within the Church: the Church's trust in,
sanction of, and bid for world-power. It has yet
to show Labour that neither legislation nor forceful
revolution is its solution.
But one of the great aims of the cross, which
has never even attracted the notice of theologians,
is that which St. Paul suggests in the Epistle to
the Ephesians: the breaking down of the barriers
of hostility between race and race, sex and sex,
nation and nation.1 How this is to work has never
been set forth or discussed, but surely we are now
beginning to understand. If it could dawn upon
Europe that the real meaning of this war was the
crucifying of Christ, that He was suffering in His
divided Church and in the broken humanity which
is His body, then there might come a repentance
and a reconciliation which nothing else could
accomplish, and so lead to the ending of war, the
aboHtion of all barriers and the passing of ancient
1 Eph. ii.14-18.
192

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
hostilities. That is perhaps the great meaning of
the cross for our age. For an earlier generation
the cross was a redemptive act whereby God and
man were reconciled; and so it is, but the cross
of Calvary was such an act only because it con
tained within itself the infinite potentialities which
history is slowly revealing. Then for a later gener
ation it came to be conceived as the moral power
for reforming personal character. For us it must
be the overthrowing of barriers and the reconstruc
tion of a new order of social and international life.
All these things must be set before men; again,
not as mere doctrines, though the closer we keep
to the great historical interpretations of the cross
the easier we shall find it to press all its applica
tions. We can now see, for instance, how mere
subjective views of the cross, which make its effi
ciency entirely dependent upon our imitation, have
misled us into identifying the way of war with
the way of the cross, which any due apprecia
tion of the old evangelical doctrine of the cross
would have prevented.
If we are going to preach the cross to our
generation, it must be preached by men who not
only see its present application but set forth that
cross in the life they are living, bearing in their
bodies the dying of the Lord Jesus: men who
have obviously been crucified with Christ. That
wiU make the meaning of the atonement clear and
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
set the cross vividly before men's eyes. If He is
lifted up again, aU men will be drawn to Him.
They will be best able to bring the world face to
face with the cross who have themselves evidently
been broken up and recreated by the cross and are
prepared to venture their own lives on the same
principle for the love of man.
AU this means that we have to bring our
generation back to a religion that it has lightly
rejected or unconsciously betrayed. We have
arrayed against us now, not so much the philoso
phers and the scientists, but the secondhand
opinion of the very popular and imperfectly under
stood science of a generation ago. These opinions
are still being popularised by superficial writers
and especiaUy by superficial preachers, who,
because they have just discovered Emerson, think
that they are up to date. In fact we have to
move that mass of opinion which likes to think
that it is progressive and broad, and wiU hardly
give us the patience to listen to what seems like
an attempt to rehabilitate obsolete ideas. And to
confine the revelation of God to Christ, or salva
tion to His cross, will seem to them intolerably
narrow. Some expect help from a certain shifting
back to orthodoxy which the war is expected to
compel; but we must be perfectly clear that a
movement of this kind is going to be no real help
at all. The orthodoxy of the past was too often
194

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
an uncritical acceptance of certain doctrines on
authority, which were therefore never even under
stood, and its rigid outlines were welcome to
those who do not want to think for themselves,
or who sought some sanction for hardening their
hearts against all who could not pronounce their
shibboleths. We have to show the broad-minded that it is
only as you have a revelation of God in Christ
that is absolute that we have any focus of the
light that lighteth every man; that only as we
make Him the centre from which we describe our
circumference can we make that circle wide enough
to include all humanity. Interpreted by Christ
there is an honourable place for aU the great world
religions; without Him they become so many
meaningless and contradictory guesses; for it is in
Christ alone that one can gather any valuable
suggestion from what these other religions were
striving to express. The general idea of the in
carnation of God in humanity is useless, unless we
know what it is that is seeking incarnation, and
that can be disclosed, not in a long and varied
process, but only in one who was a full personal
incarnation of God. We can believe that there is
a light which lighteth every man, which is the
light of all his seeing; but if we are simply to take
even the sincerest interpretations of that light and
add them together, it is obvious that we shall get
195

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
nothing but confusion, and indeed come to regard
the whole idea not only as without guidance but
as even dangerous. But if Jesus Christ is the
light which dwells in every man, it at once becomes
possible to understand what it is that any disciple
of the inner light is striving to follow. The power
of Christ to iUumine the meaning of other re
ligions is only just beginning to be recognised,
many who are recommending the ancient faiths
as religions suitable for the modern world being
apparently not aware that their present attrac
tion is due to their reinterpretation in the light of
Christianity. The power of Christ to find for
thousands their own inner light is the proof that
the two are reaUy one. The higher we make our
interpretation of Christ, the more meaning He
has for the whole of humanity, and the clearer we
conceive Him the more easily we can find our way
through Him to every heart.
It is in the conscious acknowledgment of Christ
as redeeming our souls upon the cross that human
personality reaches inner reconciliation and starts
upon a perpetual progress; but this does not mean
that the soul who. cannot make this confession or
has not yet attained this experience is thereby out
side the saving power of the cross. We must
believe that God's love for every soul, the cost
He is prepared to pay, and the way He takes to
win the soul are set forth in the cross, and the
196

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
conviction that this is God's supreme and only
way gives hope and assurance for all the lost and
striving souls of men. Love like that cannot
grow tired, or shrink from any adventure in order
to attain its object. It is on the eternal love that
there breaks visibly into our life that aU redemp
tion depends. No soul has ever been saved, no
soul has ever moved nearer the light, nay, no soul
has ever been brought into existence, save by the
love that is there revealed. The ancient clause of
the Apostles' Creed, "He descended into hell," be
comes endowed with a new meaning when we un
derstand it to signify that no hell into which man
may fall places him beyond the compassion and
power of that tireless and unflinching love.
We must show the followers of all the fashion
able cults of our times that we have some sym
pathy with what they are seeking, that it is to be
found in catholic Christianity, and that we are to
blame that they have had to seek these things out
side what they thought was only a narrow faith.
It is not enough to condemn these new faiths; we
must show how infinitely better they are served in
the majestic balance of the whole Christian faith.
If we stand fast for the faith once for all delivered
to the saints, there must be purged away from that
position the least suspicion of harshness and in
tolerance which has given the false impression that
the faith itself is a hard and inhuman thing; we
197

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
stand for it, because nowhere else is there to be
found that which holds so much for the world, can
minister to the needs of human nature, or contains
so glorious a hope for every soul.
It will not be enough to declare that a secular
humanitarianism gives absolutely no basis of hope
for the aspirations of socialists, pacifists and re
formers. There is, no doubt, much to indicate to
empirical observation that this world is incapable
of justice and that anything like equality is impos
sible. Only in a world whose basis is spirit, whose
origin was due to love, and where every soul by its
constitution has some contact with a higher nature,
have social aspirations any hope of realisation.
Nothing but the full Christian faith in the Eternal
Godhead and Sovereignty of the Father, Son and
Holy Ghost is reaUy equal to those hopes. But no
one wiU be impressed by these declarations, unless
it can also be shown that Christianity creates a
conscience progressively alive to the evils that we
have hitherto had to wait for outsiders to bring to
our attention, and can actually accomplish the re
sult for which we say these other forces will only
labour after in vain. If the Church could put an
end to war and actually bring into existence a
Christian order of society there would be little
further need for the science of apologetics or Chris
tian Evidence Societies. When Christianity has to
defend itself it is not only a sign that someone
198

RE-COMMENDATION OF CHRISTIANITY
outside has been denying the faith, but also that
someone inside has been betraying it. Christ may
be the whole and final truth, the cross the one hope
of the world, and the acceptance of the Christian
faith the most immediate need before this genera
tion; but this will dawn upon men very slowly if
the Christian Church remains in its present con
dition and Christian people do such disservice to
their faith by the life they live and are wiUing to
tolerate around them. Therefore we must recog
nise that nothing but a reformed Church can hope
to re-commend the Christian faith, and there lies
the next problem to be considered.

199

II
A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
Something of what the need of the world is, arid
of the task that must be undertaken if it is to be
met, now lies clear before us. Christianity must
be published to the whole world and republished
to Christendom with speed and insistency. Every
thing is at stake. We are standing at the parting
of the ways. There has been no crisis for the his
tory of humanity to equal this since God offered
Himself in Christ to be the world's redeemer and
was rejected by the nation that had been trained
to prepare His way to the throne of the world.
For Christ is again offering Himself for the world's
acceptance. In the anguish of the hour, when
kingdoms are rocking to their base, the social struc
ture of modern civilisation is strained to the break
ing-point and aU hearts are full of fear, it may be
left only to a few to recognise that this is the
coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven.
All that many see at the moment is the clouds, for
they have forgotten that this was to be the sign
of His coming. The stars by which they have
steered are blotted out, the horizon is everywhere
200

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
threatening, hope is fading; that is all that most
serious men can see. In reality it is the Lord
thundering at the gates; but the Church, who was
appointed to be the porter and commanded to
watch, has been drinking with the drunken and
now slumbers at her post; even she has not yet
discerned that the author of this crisis is her Lord
who, at His great rejection, took over the dictator
ship of history and taught us to see in every human
catastrophe the sign of His coming.
The recent revival of scholarly interest in apoca
lyptic has fortunately prepared us for a deeper
interpretation of what is called the Second Coming
of our Lord. We have moved away from that de
tailed and diagrammatic literalism which once beset
this subject and brought the whole idea into con
tempt; we have got past the proposals to regard
the apocalyptic elements in the Gospels as inter
polations or misunderstandings of Christ's teach
ing; and we have perhaps come to the end of the
equally weak device of regarding His language as
due to an obsolete phUosophy of apocalyptic which
we have to disregard, and His ideas as rather
fantastic symbols of purely inner changes which
we must thoroughly spiritualise before we can apply
them to actual history. The general view of the
progress of history and the advance of man, which
made Christ's outlook seem fevered and out of
relation to the facts and forces of the universe, has
201

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
been swept aside by closer observation of what
actually happens. The penultimate modern view
of history as a slow and steady march of life which
knows no set-back, but advances by infinitesimal
and inevitable stages towards some end already
implicit in the organism, is now recognised to be
an illegitimate application to history of immature
biological science. The development of life has not
always been slow, steady and straightforward; ex
periments have been made which have ended in
disaster or have reached a false goal. A great deal
of freedom seems to be allowed even to non-con
scious life to direct its own way, only certain paths
being blocked and the true path alone always left
open. When life makes a mistake it has to back
to the juncture where it went wrong, and then we
may see a sudden leap forward along the right
path. So it is in history. Human society develops
along certain lines, and may reach a great height
of perfection; but there it stops, and no further
advance is possible. Along other lines it comes to
swift decline and sudden disaster. History is strewn
with wrecked civilisations; again and again society
has been put back and started again on a simpler
level. On the other hand, the emergence of great
leaders or the synthesis of certain elements of
thought give enormous lifts to humanity, and
accomplish in a day what centuries could not reach.
The recognition that apocalyptic dominates the
202

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
outlook of Christ shows that His teaching falls into
line with this modern idea of progress. He looks
forward to history developing in a series of crises.
The leaven is hidden in the lump, the seed is
sown in secret, the great summertime of oppor
tunity may be preceded by the gentle and unob
trusive signs of spring; but suddenly the whole
mass of humanity swells and heaves with the hidden
ferment, the sickle must be thrust in because the
harvest is ripe, the age reaches its vintage and the
grapes are trodden in the press. That is how
matters appear to those who know the signs and
remain on the watch. But to others the great days
of history flash like sudden lightning across the sky,
the great opportunities come and go like a thief in
the night. This means that to every age there is
a consummation and a judgment; but that with
every judgment there is also the offer of oppor
tunity. The clouds break and the Son of man is
seen seated at the right hand of power and ready to
come in glory. Of all these events Christ regarded
Himself as the supreme author. It is a very per
sonal reading of history, and it means a stupendous
claim for Christ, but philosophy, with its modern
estimate of personality as the supreme factor, can
not forbid consideration of the idea; there is no
better clue to history, and we know now that this
is what Jesus was claiming to be every time He
caUed Himself the Son of man.
203

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
There are many who do regard the hour as one
of the great judgment days of the world. They
feel that so stupendous a catastrophe cannot be
wholly due to the will of one man or the treachery
of one nation. They look round for deeper moral
causes. Unfortunately they move with great un
certainty in an area where freaks and false prophets
have long occupied the ground, and they put for
ward the most ridiculous interpretations of why
God is thus punishing humanity. It is Sabbath
Desecration, Ritualism, the neglect of reverence to
our Lady, the Welsh Church Act; or it is Im
purity, Intemperance and Gambling. All this pro
ceeds on the assumption that the judgments of
God have to be imposed in a quite external and
unrelated way, and with no recognition of the prin
ciple that the punishment should fit the crime; in
fact, with no discernment that God's judgments
always spring out of the sin itself and are never due
to explosions of vengeance or the infliction of arbi
trary suffering. The catastrophe that has befaUen
Europe is the natural and inevitable outcome of the
phUosophy that has come to rule the modern mind
and the life that we have set before us as the goal
of our ambitions. This is what the materialistic
estimate of life and the trust in might always lead
to. Yet even if some have been enabled to discern
this they still propose that the one way to save
us from this disaster is a temporary trust in the
204

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
very things that have brought it upon us : force and
material might.
It is, however, far more important that we should
all come to discern that behind this judgment stands
the Son of man offering once again His oft-rejected
way. If we could get men to lift their heads
above the strife they would see that once again re
demption draws nigh, and they might stretch their
hands to grasp what is offered to them.
This, then, is the nature of the crisis. It is
not political or economic in its ultimate essence;
it is due to the drawing near of Christ. The mes
sage that wants ringing round the world again is,
"The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and be
lieve the good news." How can that be done?
We ought, before inquiring after new methods
of evangelisation, to recognise what the world
owes to those methods that have been already
tried. The attempt to evangelise the world,
the whole motive and method of what are called
Foreign Missions, are regarded by the average man
of the world, and unfortunately by many profess
ing Christians, as mistaken, fantastic and a waste
of energy. It may be admitted that in the early
stages of modern Missions the motive was often in
adequate, that some of the missionaries were un
enlightened and some of the methods short-sighted.
But the Foreign Missionary enterprise is a self-
educating and self -reforming enterprise; and the
205

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
devotion which often underlay admittedly crude
presentations of Christianity and an imperfect un
derstanding of how Christianity ought to be related
to the other world-religions nevertheless did not
fail of its reward. For the Spirit of God is not
entirely dependent upon the instrument that He
has to use. No one who is conversant with the
subject of Foreign Missions can fail to recognise
that this has been the most hopeful enterprise of
Christian history, has proved the universal mission
of Christianity beyond all doubt, and has already
laid the whole world under an obligation that is
at last beginning to be realised by competent and
thoughtful observers. Indeed, the Missionary enter
prise is the one indisputably Christian flag flying
at present; it is the only answer that the Church
can make to a world at war. Here is our substi
tute for the way of war actually at work; here is
the "other way" which we are being challenged
to show. To go forth to uncivilised or hostile
peoples with no force behind one but the love of
God, and no wages asked but to share the suffering
of Christ, is the real redemptive enterprise. It is
beginning to dawn upon some people that Chris
tian Missions are really acting as a leaven in the
Eastern world, for instance, and that whether the
East shall become Christian is a matter that vitally
concerns every nation and must determine the fu
ture of humanity. If the East with its swarming
206

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
millions should ever learn our civilisation on its in
dustrial and military side only, while it abandons
its ancient religions and ethic — both of which are
happening before our eyes — the supremacy and
even the safety of the West is more than threatened.
We have seen what can happen to our semi-Chris
tianised civilisation; but what a purely atheistic
civilisation could be, we can perhaps now begin
to imagine.
Or if, as is also possible, the West finally re
jects Christianity, and Europe goes on its chosen
way of self-destruction, then we have to be thankful
that this once-despised enterprise has already pro
vided some guarantee that if the light goes out here
it shaU have been first handed on where it may burn
far brighter. Throughout our era Christianity has
always been on the move, ever saving itself from
decline only by being transplanted to some virgin
soil; as if it must first seek some embodiment not
yet obtained before it can conquer the whole world.
We can discern many points in which the East
may be more naturally disposed to elements in the
Christian faith that have never been understood by
the Western world. There is less natural concern
among Hindus, for instance, to make material pos
session the one essential for happiness, and among
the Chinese, for instance, to make military exploits
the end of national existence.
What we may conclude from this success of
207

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Foreign Missions for the further propaganda of
Christianity is full of hope. Here we see what can
be done by an enterprise badly supported by the
Church as a whole and started by a handful of not
always the most enlightened type of Christians.
Barbarism can be educated, savagery transformed,
vast populations penetrated by the Christian prin
ciple, and the hope of the Christianisation of the
entire world shown to be no wild and empty dream.
If any Christian is perplexed by the present situa
tion to such an extent that he cannot see where to
look for hope or where to lend his support, here
is one enterprise that marks a clear way out to
wards the greater future. And perhaps, despite
all the confusion of the Church, we may still unite
on this one duty of carrying the Gospel to all
the world as soon as possible. This crisis which
has come upon the world wUl not leave that mes
sage, even as it is conveyed to the pagan and the
heathen world, without some change, at least of
emphasis. The Eastern nations must be shown
most clearly what the issues in the Western world
reaUy are. There are dangers here of which it is
to be hoped that missionaries abroad and Missionary
Societies at home will be sufficiently alive to. The
war may give just that wrong turn to Foreign
Missionary enterprise which will corrupt its motives
and in the end bring all its activities to nought.
There wiU be a natural desire to represent the great
208

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
struggle in the West in terms most favourable to
ourselves; as fighting on the side of the Kingdom
of God, while the enemy is fighting for the devil.
This is a partial and superficial interpretation, and
it wUl only discredit in the end those who employ
it. From all accounts many intelligent pagans have
already formed a very different conception of what
is happening. There is only one explanation that
I would commend to our honoured missionary
brethren as at all safe or worthy: this war is the
judgment of God on the Western world, its last
great opportunity to appropriate the Gospel, and
the real issues of the war are between the Kingdom
of Christ and a secularised civilisation. On the
whole, we can leave our missionaries on the field
to the wider judgment which their work naturally
begets. A more serious warning must be addressed
to missionary societies at the home base, which are
inclined to play up to the patriotic motive as a
possible aid in gaining the support of our semi-
pagan hordes at home for this most Christian enter
prise. One sometimes meets with the suggestion
that since India has done so much for the Empire
we ought to spend more on her evangelisation; it
is the least return that we can make. Surely every
one can see that these arguments may lead to a
disastrous confusion. Let it once be understood
that Missions are a part of some Imperial scheme,
and they may for a time win support from those
209

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
who would fail to be touched by the appeal to
Christian motives, but the end will be unrelieved
catastrophe. We fancy that we have sometimes de
tected about the expressed motive of some German
missionaries a touch of the commercial and imperial
concern, and the "yellow peril" has been openly
urged as a motive for which the Christianisation
of the East should be undertaken. This may be
doing an injustice to the real motive that has
made Germany our great ally in the past in this
matter; but whether it is or not, let us keep as far
away from this unholy taint as possible. There
may be something in the threat of the yellow peril,
but we are certain that it is not a sound appeal to
urge the evangelisation of the East in order to
save the West from a catastrophe that, as a matter
of fact, it richly deserves for presenting the East
with such a perversion of what Christianity means.
We send the Gospel eastwards not only because
we are certain that the East needs Christ, but also
because we are beginning to feel that we shall
never get a full vision of Christ or a world view of
Christianity until the East has brought its contri
bution both to our thought and practice of the
Christian faith.
But while we must see to it that nothing aUows
Foreign Missionary enterprise to suffer at this
time, there is another problem of even greater
dimensions, namely, that of re-evangelising Europe.
210

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
This compromised Christianity must go, and at
present it seems as if Christianity will be aban
doned rather than its full application be attempted.
How are we going to bring home to our Western
civilisation what Christianity means, and show
that all our troubles and this latest disaster
come from our semi-paganism and our divided
aUegiance? Moreover, think of the vast masses of
people all over Europe to whom Christianity means
simply nothing more than an effete superstition or
a harmless hobby of no importance whatsoever.
Think of our intellectuals playing about with strange
fire and mad ideas and lending their genius to the
confusing, and corrupting, and misleading of our
half-educated classes. Think of our official classes
paying conventional court to Christianity, and all
the time worshipping prestige and world power and
all the other national idols that have brought us to
this hour. One's mind is almost paralysed, and
faith can only put forth faint ideals of what ought
to be done to meet the situation.
Yet we ought not to be dismayed at the pros
pect. We have to our hand means that were not
open to Boniface, Francis, or Wesley. Modern
travel makes anywhere in Europe only a week away.
The diffusion of thought made possible by cheap
printing multiplies a millionfold those whom the
voice could reach. What would earlier evangelists
have given for such opportunities! Yet with the
211

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
extensipn of external means we ourselves seem to
have shrunken inwardly, our minds lacking light
and our spirits venture. One dreams of bands of
young men pushing right through Europe after
the war with the challenge of the Kingdom, offer
ing the choice of God or mammon, Christ or
Caesar, the Cross or the sword. One longs for
some mighty intellect and saintly genius who could
pour forth pamphlets, tracts and books which would
arrest the mind of the age with the forceful com
mendation of Christianity. We want the early
ideals of the Franciscan, the Dominican and the
Jesuit orders recovered, purified and fused together:
riches, intellect and obedience laid at the feet of
Christ. Of such things we can only play the
prophet and hope to bring to birth the man for
the hour by our inspirations and our prayers. The
true method of evangelisation wUl probably have to
be quite new, and untU it is found to be suddenly
at work no one wUl be able to predict what form
it wUl take. If only some of the genius, devotion,
and sacrifice that was given to the militant Suffrage
movement could be devoted to Christian propa
ganda, we might see women discovering the new
and more effective way. They have suffered in this
hour and will be left alive to tell the tale. But
we cannot see ahead, and it is idle to speculate upon
detaUs; yet neither need we sit still with folded
hands. 212

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
We know that all revivals of religion have been
connected with some great name, but that must
not delude us into thinking that the great name
was the cause of the movement. The slightest in
vestigation will show that it was simply that some
absolutely single-minded personality passed through
the typical experience of the age and so could set
before men what it was they were groping after.
And we know that we need not simply wait for
the appearance of the great personality, however
essential he may be. All these movements found
a prepared soil. The people of God had been
everywhere groaning under the evils of the hour,
feeling the perplexities of the situation, bemoaning
the falling away, and crying for the deliverer. If
only we could get men to feel how wrong things
are, if only the anguish of the hour was not
making too many of us callous to pain and blind
with grief, this time of travail might end in the
bringing forth of a redeemer. But the people are
still crying out for some mighty conqueror who
shall deliver them from their enemies, looking for
a dictator who will shoulder their responsibilities
and bring order out of the chaos they have made;
they are not yet praying for one who will bring
deliverance to all peoples by calling man back
again to God. The true prophet and leader must
be virgin born, that is, he must be born of pure
desire, humanity yielding itself to God's purposes
213

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
and solely to fulfil His will. It is therefore from
the womb of the Betrothed of Christ, the Church
of God, that the true man must issue. And it is
just this that brings us face to face with our greatest
difficulties. It is to the Church that we must look
for that outburst of evangelistic zeal, for the pro
duction of the religious leader, for the new race
of preachers, or for whatever form the new re
ligious movement is to take; and we might do so
with confidence if only her adultery with the world
had not given her a miscarrying womb and dry
breasts. Without the fellowship that creates the
prophet and the prayer that ordains him, we shall
get no one who will come forth from the presence
of God and strike home to the heart of the people.
"How shall they preach except they be sent?"
All this means in plain language that we can ex
pect no revival of religion such as is the world's
one hope, no propaganda of the faith until the
Church is right with her Lord and has come to
clearer understanding of the faith to which she is
committed. Before the Church can teach she must learn;
before she can learn she must listen; and this means
that we must call the Church first of all to a work
of self -education in the mind of Christ.
No one can deny that, taken as a whole, Chris
tian people do not know to what their faith com
mits them. The lack of understanding and grip
214

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
of the fundamental realities of their faith is every
where noticed and deplored. We have the catholic
type, with the dogmas all learned off by heart,
and the sacramental means of grace faithfully ob
served, but apparently with little idea how these
things are to be applied to their common life in
the world. We have the liberal type, intent
upon applications of the faith, certain that Chris
tianity is a matter of character and conduct, yet
for lack of anchorage to principles getting hope
lessly at sea, losing all sense of a special vocation
in the world, and at last settling down to the
ethic of being agreeable, reliable and kind as the
all-sufficient confession of Christianity. The con
ditions everywhere show that the Church is not
instructing her children. This is partly due to the
great division between Catholic and Protestant,
which has developed opposed and one-sided meth
ods. The sacramental system provides an oppor
tunity for mystical contact, but it often leaves out
of account both the need for clear inteUectual com
prehension of God and consistent expression in
daily life. If any teaching accompanies the sac
ramental system, it is generally negative and
trivial; one must abstain from sexual sin and not go
to dissenting places of worship; one must not steal
and must be sure to abstain from meat on Fridays.
But it is equally certain that the pulpit system of
Protestantism also fails to instruct. If the pulpit
215

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
deals with the application of Christianity to public
and social life it tends to merge its message into
recommending schemes of legislation or the sup
port of political parties, while the need for feeding
the soul with worship and communion gets over
looked. In practice the pulpit has to confine itself
to inspiration, and that comes down in the end to
providing warm comforts for the soul and emotional
uplifts; which again hide the demand for a mental
grasp of Christian principles and a life expression
of the faith. It would probably make a great dif
ference if the sacramental and the preaching system
could be reconciled; but even this union would not
entirely meet the need. Preaching must always
run largely to exhortation; but it is impossible to
exhort people to any purpose unless one can as
sume some understanding both of principles and
duty. The pulpit cannot be made into a proper
educational force, because the day has gone by
when people wiU consent to any form of instruction
where they have to remain entirely passive and
silent. If we do have in our Churches those who
are still children in the faith, we must remember
that they are grown up in other respects; and when
we attempt to instruct from the pulpit we are not
giving the people even the opportunity we aUow
to a Sunday-school class. Self -education, if it is
properly guided, is the only kind of education that
really builds up a true knowledge, and nowhere is
216

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
that more so than in religion. What is therefore
wanted in all Churches is a system of Christian
self-education. We have become convinced about
the need of education in the universal acceptance
of the Sunday-school system and in the revolution
in its methods which have recently been attempted.
But we really need to turn the whole Church into
a Sunday school, with such adaptations as would
be necessary for adults. What is wanted is a class
system something like that provided by the Adult
School, where a systematic scheme of study is fol
lowed and the freest discussion is allowed. There
are three branches of study obviously needed:
Biblical, Theological, and Sociological. But for
better efficiency we need to combine the discus
sion-class system with the tutorial system. The
classes need to be presided over by trained leaders
who are authorities on their subjects. That seems
to make an impossible demand, for in a Church of
any size we should have to secure a large number
of such leaders. But this would not be impossible
if, connected with every large Church, or with a
group of small Churches, there was a real expert
who was set apart to organise this educational work.
He could train the class leaders in their subjects,
receive their reports of the difficulties that had
emerged, or the type of thought that was found
to prevail, and so would know what the people
were really thinking and saying.
217

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
It would be essential, of course, that these
classes should not become mere debating societies.
Provision against that would be found partly in
the right kind of leader, whose trained authority
would secure respect; but the whole system would
have to be set in an intense atmosphere of re
ligious fellowship and common worship. For this
two kinds of worship are necessary: the Prayer
Meeting and the Communion Service. It may
seem almost ridiculous to suggest prayer meetings,
after the experience of them that many of us have
had. But although at the lowest to which they
can degenerate they are the most wearisome and
nauseating of all exercises, where there is real fel
lowship among those who take part and a real
desire to know the mind and realise the guidance
of God, they become supreme means of spiritual
education. Such a combination of fellowship in
prayer and united study would make each side
react upon the other; the study would become re
ligious and earnest, and the prayers would become
definite and purposeful. We place equal import
ance upon a solemn celebration of the Communion,
because that provides the opportunity for unob
trusive yet intense devotion and the imposition of
a silent worship which would prune the prayer
meeting type of prayer of its sometimes irreverent
and speech-making elements, and cast over all the
discussion the spirit of adoration. 218

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
In what order, or proportion, or at what times
these separate elements should be gathered to
gether would have to be discovered by experiment,
but there should be some endeavour to secure that
they are all linked together. We must have no
kind of compulsion, but it ought to be understood
that full membership in the Church was not granted
until one had attended for at least a year at these
instruction classes. But if we could get an early
celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday morning,
and the instruction class followed by the prayer
meeting of an equaUy small group, not only would
Sunday morning be better employed than it is at
present, but there would surely be produced out of
this combination men and women who were saintly,
informed and fired, to serve their generation,
whether as evangelists, or social workers, or in the
carrying out of their principles in family life, the
social circle, and the commerce of the world.
But this system necessitates that we must set
the ministry free from the present impossible de-:
mands made upon it and attempt some specialisa
tion of its manifold functions. It ought to be
obvious by now that the endeavour to make every
man a priest, prophet, evangelist and teacher is
impossible. There are many men in the pulpit
who toil to produce two sermons on Sunday with
enormous effort and little success. Preaching is
a distinct gift, and very few possess it. But at
219

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
present the vast wealth of the Church is practicaUy
being expended on the production of millions of
sermons twice every Sunday. The tyranny of the
sermon must be broken if we are to get on. Let
us use the prophetic and evangelistic type of
preacher in as large numbers as God is ever pleased
to send to us, but do not let us perpetuate the
present system where he is tied down to the pul
pit which can afford to pay him best, and there
destroy both his own soul and the souls of his
hearers by this everlasting sermon production, out
of which sooner or later all reality must depart.
Let such men belong not to a congregation, but to
the Church, and provided with suitable opportuni
ties, either in the churches, or in public buildings,
for their particular work of inspiring the Church or
gathering in those outside. Such preachers would
probably have to belong to some sort of religious
order, so as to secure for them the checks as well
as the inspiration of close contact with their fel
lows, and to remove them from all temptation to
make money.
Whether the teacher and the priest should be
one and the same is a difficult question; if the two
offices were separated we should simply get the
sacerdotal and the rational instinct drifting apart
again. Perhaps it would be well to consider the
suggestion of Tyrrell, that the priest should be un
paid, earning his living in the world, since simply
220

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
for the priestly part of worship a man does not
need lengthy training, and we might thus avoid the
false claims that priesthood has been tempted to
make when it has been committed to a caste living
a different life from others. The teacher would
have to be trained as we now train the ordinary
ministry, with considerable improvement and modi
fications, of course. But there is one work of
the priest for which the most careful training is
necessary, namely, the work of the Pastor in the
Protestant Churches and the office of Confessor in
the Catholic Churches. These two offices really lie
close together, and their fusion would solve many
problems. The cure of souls is the greatest of all
callings, and it needs to be exercised with aU the
gifts that nature can bestow, all the knowledge of
moral and mental problems that training can give,
and the authority to give absolution which the
Church has the right and power to delegate. There
probably need not be one person exercising the pas
toral office for every congregation; for it is needless
to say that the hurried call and the afternoon-tea
visit, which has to do duty for pastoral work to-day,
and which simply wears some men to death at an
utterly meaningless and ineffectual task, would be
abolished. There is a necessity for providing that
the membership of a Church shall be kept in close
contact by friendly visitation, but this could be done
by making the diaconate a real lay order and hand-
221

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
ing over this work to them. We assume that the
need for the bishop, to exercise a more general over
sight, is now recognised even by Nonconformists,
for they really include that office, partly disguised
under their Departmental Secretaryships and par
tially fulfiUed by those honoured and learned breth
ren whom even the Congregational student likes to
secure for his ordination service.
But for the professional ministry, teacher, pastor
or bishop, there must be more opportunity for
fellowship. The riot of opinions in the Church to
day, as well as the absence of fire and enthusiasm,
is everywhere traceable to the lack of fellowship.
We must leave to our ministry more time, not only
for private, but for corporate study and prayer. It
is only through fellowship that we shall ever get
again a real grip of the catholic faith of Christian
ity, and only by waiting together in prayer and
communion can we be prepared for the baptism of
the Holy Ghost.
It will be disappointing if this discussion of the
details of Church organisation, the education of
our people, and the specialisation of the ministry,
appears to anyone to be irrelevant to the task of
propaganda which is the concern of this chapter.
We cannot propagate a faith we do not under
stand; we cannot expect to see arise among us the
venturesome evangelist who shaU set the world on
fire, unless he has received that fire first of all
222

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
from God; and the first essential for both the
knowledge and power that the Church needs so
badly is fellowship. The Church is failing to-day,
and she has been led away in this present crisis,
simply because she is not a Church; because she
fails in real communion and fellowship. The mys
tical unity of the Eucharist, or the hand-shakirig
fervours of an occasional social gathering, are not
sufficient to provide that fellowship on which the
Church depends for her illumination and the bap
tism of fire. It is all very well to claim that the
Church possesses the truth and is promised the in-
faUible guidance of the Holy Ghost. I believe that
there is given to the Church the keys of the King
dom of heaven, that the Church is the Body of
Christ, the perpetuation of His incarnation, and
endowed with all the teaching, healing and redeem
ing powers of her glorious Head; but these powers
and attributes can only be claimed for a "Church"
— that is, for a fellowship. It must provide a real
fellowship both for ministry and ordinary members,
a feUowship of faith, a communion in holy things.
The first reform we need to secure is that the
Church shall be a Church.
It is out of this educational and spiritual fellow
ship that the solution of all our difficulties is going
to come. There will be bred in this atmosphere
the peculiar type which the Church alone can pro
duce, namely, the saint. Secular education is wrong
223

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
somewhere at its very foundation. It destroys our
imagination, our instincts, our power of initiative.
The modern mind has been paralysed by problems
which would never have troubled a healthy mind
at all; for it has asked questions that could never
be answered, simply because they ought never to
have been asked. But even where the modern
mind is certainly in advance of the mediaeval mind,
namely, in ethical passion and discernment, it is
callosified by its lack of imagination and paralysed
by the destruction of its instincts.
All the world knows that war is wrong, that it
must be done away with because it is sin, sin of
blood-guiltiness that stains the soul, depraves the
mind and maddens the passions. Yet in this war
we have the finest ethical ideals of the age being
used in every country to urge men to slaughter their
fellows, and we are arguing round and round to
try to prove that war can be Christian. How can
people be so blind? Has all the ethical awakening
of the past century been of so httle depth that
this bloody slaughter, this hellish torture, this
treacherous game of war can still secure ethical
approval? It would be impossible thus to prosti
tute our ethical ideals if imagination had not been
destroyed by a mechanical education. The men
who see this thing close at hand know that nothing
can make it righteous and nothing can sanctify it.
It is only those who stay behind in safety, and who
224

A NEW CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
have suppressed their feelings and vetoed their
imagination, who can spin fine theories about its
necessity, its purifying effects, and the redemption
that will be wrought by its sacrifice.
But even if we felt all this about war, it is very
unlikely that we should be able to do anything to
stop it. We have lost initiative. When we are
sure that we ought to act we do not know how to
act. We have turned aU our energies to theory
work; we make no mistakes, but we make nothing
else; we take no risks, but we achieve no marvels.
It is in the conviction, the power, the ambition
after holiness that fellowship awakes, that we shaU
produce the type of man that we need, not only
to confront the world with the present challenge of
the Cross, but also to bring about an international
reconciliation that shall not be broken again. Let
the Church begin to be a Church, and we shall begin
to see again a succession of evangelists, prophets
and saints that wiU turn the world upside down,
construct the true order of Christian society, build
a universal Church, and establish the Kingdom of
God on earth.

525

Ill
THE SOCIAL AND INTERNATIONAL
APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
The deeper the internal appreciation of Christianity
penetrates, the more it will demand external expres
sion; the more we become convinced of the abso
lute Lordship of Christ, the wider we shall desire
to see His reign extended over every department
of life. A real grip of the principle of the Incar
nation carries with it the apprehension that human
personality and temporal existence, so far from
offering barriers to the Divine nature and the
redemptive purpose, were created for these very
ends. There is nothing, therefore, in human society,
nothing in its economic basis, which should offer
any barrier to the application of Christian prin
ciples. This same principle carries with it the Cath
olic conclusion that there must be a perpetuation of
the Incarnation in the building up of a visible
society which shall be the Body of Christ and the
nucleus of redeemed humanity. The Church must
express its devotion to its Divine Lord in a worship
which, since man is body, soul and spirit, must
embrace ritual expression and a theology, as weU
226

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
as the mystic worship of the spirit. Catholic ideals
of the Visible Body have so deteriorated into
mere ecclesiasticism, and Catholic practice of wor
ship confined itself so completely to ritual, that
Protestantism has been tempted to abandon the
idea of a visible society and to aim at the permea
tion of human society with Christian principles,
and to prohibit all bodily expression in worship in
order to emphasise the worship of the mind and
soul. Catholicism has lingered so much over the
initial stages of Christian expression that it has
therefore encouraged Protestantism to try to dis
pense with them and begin farther on. The mis
take made by this attempt to put asunder what
God has joined together is now visible in the social
impotence of Christendom and the drying up of
the springs of worship and art. But the Catholic
principle only needs extending to its full natural
expression to be effective right through life. We
must build a visible society, but surely that is not
completed when we have founded what is often a
mere association for certain religious purposes;
that does not merit the name of a society at all.
We have been pleading for a restoration of that
fellowship which is the very purpose of a Church,
but no fellowship is worthy of the name which is
only fellowship for certain isolated purposes, while
outside these life goes on in strife and enmity.
All merely sacramental or mystic feUowship must
227

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
degenerate into formalism and hypocrisy unless it
creates a fellowship in the common necessities of
life. But the Sacrament itself, with its eating of
the same loaf and drinking of the same cup, is a
solemn protest against the luxury and poverty into
which society is divided outside the Church door.
The Church cannot restrict its fellowship merely to
the things of the spirit.
The lesson is the same if we foUow out the
connection between religion and art. All art has
come into being to express religious aspiration; it
originates as an accessory to worship; ritual is
the art of the body, the plastic arts the ritual of
the mind, music the ritual of the spirit. But the
more these are allowed the wider grows the demand
for beauty in life. The discouragement of these
things as true parts of worship has allowed to
grow up, chiefly since the Reformation, our ugly
cities, our ugly clothes, our ugly industrialism.
The confirmation of what a wrong kind of protest
the Reformation was is seen in the fact that the
study of art has been the means of many moderns
finding their way back to religion and awakening
them to the need of social reform.
But we are to deal particularly with the expres
sion of religion in social fellowship. There has never
been a time in the Christian Church when it was
not recognised that the only way of showing the
love we have towards God is by loving our neigh-
228

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
bour. The full implication of this has not been
always recognised; fellowship is a matter on which
we have to develop a consciousness as well as a
conscience; but the recognition has always been
widening. The Creeds are abstract accounts of
how Fellowship is preserved in the Godhead and
created between God and man. All our ritual is
a ritual of fellowship. Art is an expression of as
piration which cannot come into existence without
fellowship, and is meaningless unless it is enjoyed
in fellowship. But the supreme expression of re
ligion is the fellowship of social life.
In its early stages Christianity began to push
its feeling for feUowship under the old-established
practice of chattel slavery, until eventually it
brought it to the ground. But the growth of indus
trialism has simply replaced chattel and feudal
slavery by another form, that of wage slavery.
Under this system men are forced to sell their labour
to others in order to gain the right to work, for the
means of production are all locked up in private
ownership. This not only dictates at what a man
shall work, where, and for how long, but also re
sembles slavery in that the system ignores personal
rights, and wages always gravitate, despite all ad
justments, towards the bare subsistence level. When
you possess accumulated capital, that is, the power
to command labour, you emerge from wage slavery
and become a slave owner. 229

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Slowly but surely the Christian conscience is
being wakened to see that its doctrine of fellowship
is being everywhere flouted and denied by the sys
tem that has grown up around us. The economic
doctrine that the wage system involves absolute
slavery may be disputed, but its evil effects are
patent. Everyone can see that under the present
system the farther off you stand from actual pro
duction the more likelihood you have of making
a fortune. This means that the less necessary you
are to society the better you are rewarded. The
old idea that if only everyone was temperate,
thrifty and industrious there would be no poverty,
really implies that if everyone was this everyone
would rise to the employing class, when there would
be no one to work for us. The profits of mechanical
industrialism are greater than such necessary work
as agriculture, for instance, and therefore the whole
world is drifting towards a condition of industrial
competition in which it may find itself possessed
of everything save food to eat. These ultimate
issues are not generally recognised, but what meets
the eye and smites the mind of all who care for
the highest common interests of mankind is that
the system works out to an ever greater disparity
between the rich and the poor, that fellowship is re
placed by suspicion, hostility and the "class war,"
and that religion comes to be a mere mockery, since
the fellowship on which it rests has been destroyed.
230

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
Here, then, is a social system which denies to
religion both its basis and its expression. And it
is a system which most people can now see will
not yield to smiles, handshakes, Eucharists and
being polite to workmen. It does not matter how
nice you are to your next door neighbour, how
beautifully you may behave when a working man
is shown into your pew by mistake, how much you
may labour to make him feel at home in the glorious
churches he has built, if outside, and all the other
days of the week, you are living on him, selling
him like a slave. Whenever the truth dawns upon
the Church as a whole we shall cease to be amazed
that workmen get more and more to look to so
cialism as a religion and to preach the class war
and economic revolution as their one hope. Social
ism may be a heresy; the Roman Catholic Church
practically treats it as such; but, like all heresies,
it is simply a bit of the Catholic faith which
someone has made the only article of faith in
revenge for the Church having forgotten and
denied it.
What attitude must the Church take towards
these social conditions? We have moved past the
stage when it was thought that charity could remedy
the situation. Under the present system charity
blesses neither him that gives nor him that re
ceives. This is a serious reflection for the Church,
which has made almsgiving so great an expression
231

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
of Christian love ; one of its greatest practical virtues
has become partly an insult and partly a crime.
We have also got past the day when the fallacy
of "indifferentism" could be recommended even to
the wealthy Church member as the essence of the
Gospel on this subject. We have every right to
maintain that spiritual concerns do immensely de
crease the anxiety with which men regard outward
possessions, and that it is possible to have the peace
of God though some fierce tyrant may be starving
you to death. The Gospel does declare that poverty
is safer for the soul than riches. But by poverty
it means neither destitution nor forcible restriction
from access to the means of production, which is
what poverty spells to-day. But the Gospel gives
no countenance to the idea that we may have the
peace of God while we are forcing others to remain
in poverty. All the interior resources of religion
are open to those who may be in prison, subjected
to torture, compelled to fight with wild beasts in
the amphitheatre; but these same resources are not
open to those who are inflicting these penalties
upon their victims. The poor man may be coun
selled to be indifferent to his condition, but the
rich man is not allowed to be. It seems a paradox,
but it really bases itself upon the recognition that
the riches of the rich man are the cause of the
poor man's poverty. The parable of Dives and
Lazarus has been criticised because the rich man
232

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
seems to go to hell for nothing else but the crime
of being rich. Precisely; that is the reason.
Perhaps no one of any intelligence or Christian
disposition now urges that the present system
would be aU right if only it were worked in the
right spirit. The present system will not allow you
to act in the right spirit, for often when I act
thus to one person I have to act otherwise to an
other. In a system of competition, where I am
nice to one grocer I have to threaten the existence
of another. The right spirit would create a different
system. Neither can the Church remain content with
examining the various principles of social and
economic reconstruction which are placed before
us, and criticising and rejecting them because they
do not follow the Christian principle. It is only
fair that those who have put forward the principles
thus criticised should ask, What, then, does your
Gospel teach? It is quite on the right lines that
emphasis should be laid upon the study of social
problems as one of the great duties of modern
Christians, but it must not end in mere academic
study. It may be necessary for the Christian Church
to "create an atmosphere" in which these sub
jects are rightly considered and true reform is
likely to grow; but it must be confessed that the
atmosphere created up to the present is either
foggy or muggy, leaving us quite without guidance
233

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
as to what line Christian action ought to take, or
making us all too "done" to lift a little finger to
bring the true conditions into being.
The Church ought by now to be discovering
what the Gospel principles of the social order are,
and how that order ought to be established. It
may be thought that there is very little real guid
ance on such subjects in the teaching of Christ,
and that we have no right to expect that there should
be; but we hold that Christ's teaching reaUy covers
all true human need, and history shows that it is
only developing human need that enables us to
recognise its enormous range and profundity. Some
things stand out quite clearly. The Gospel forbids
us to estimate life according to the abundance of
possessions, and does advocate poverty as preferable
for the soul. It does set forth the ideal of service
as superior to that of being served. What do these
principles mean when translated into economic
terms? For they must not remain a mere spirit,
but must incarnate themselves in a social order.
These principles may seem slight enough to serve as
the foundations of a true society, but careful study
will show that they are capable of wide appfication.
The other question is, What is the Gospel
method of working towards such an ideal social
order? One can presume upon a general agree
ment among all Christian people who have given a
thought to the matter that, in the Kingdom of
234

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
God, there will be a condition of society to which
economic communism is the nearest concrete thing
that has been conceived. The real differences be
gin to emerge when we ask how that is to be
approached. We need waste no time over the idea
that we shaU have to wait for this order to be
set up by the sudden intervention of God, or that
the Christian Church must only supply the leaven
ing idea and disown all organisation and politics as
essentiaUy evil, though there is something true
underlying both these ideas which has to be recog
nised: namely, that we cannot expect to create the
new society without a much greater recognition of
God and dependence upon Him than at present is
common, and that the coercive method of legisla
tion and the scheming of politics are both excluded
as methods the Church cannot adopt.
Consider for a moment the proposals for work
ing towards the ideal society that have been put
forward, not simply to criticise, but in order to
see if we can find by contrast what the Church's
policy must be. There is the Liberal programme
of redressing the inequalities of possession by taxa
tion. But this is slow, raises the cry of confisca
tion, and is apparently ineffective, for taxation gen
eraUy descends until it presses hardest upon the
working classes. There is the Socialistic principle
of the State ownership of all the means of produc
tion, transport and exchange. But this scheme is
235

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
beginning to lose some of its old attraction, even for
the working classes, for it may still mean that the
State will be tyrannical and the workers attain little
real liberty. There remains the Syndicalist proposal
that the workers should completely own, manage
and control everything connected with their various
trades, and that they should employ what expert
knowledge and managerial ability may be neces
sary. It is generally held that such control of the
industrial machine could only be attained by a gen
eral strike or some other violent method.
Over all these suggestions there hangs the threat
of coercion, the bitterness which the struggle must
entail, the necessity for the Church to take sides,
with all the peril that means. Is it not possible
to build up the new social order within the old
one, the task being undertaken by those who have
come so far as to see that this is the one confession
of their faith in Christ's Lordship for which they
must live or die? It is precisely this that the Gospel
seems to indicate. Christ expected that His fol
lowers would start constructing an order of society
on quite opposite lines to that which prevailed
among the nations, a society where there would be
no lording it over others, but only a struggle for
the bottom place and an ambition to do the most
humble tasks. Is it possible to work out what that
would mean as an actual society, and to take steps
towards establishing it? 236

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
Nothing more can be thrown out here but the
roughest suggestions, for the writer professes no
ability to deal with subjects of this nature. But
there are concrete examples before us of what can
be done and of what has been accomplished. Take
the great Co-operative Movement. It has never
realised its early ideals, but it is still capable of
being reformed and extended. What a glorious
thing it would have been if the Church had com
menced this movement and had encouraged all
Christian people to be co-operators. Go back to the
Middle Ages, and we have the Church setting before
those who would follow Christ more perfectly the
monastic life. Much time has been spent in criti
cising monasticism and in repeating ridiculous stories
about its failure, with the result that it is generally
regarded as an anti-social experiment, undertaken
for utterly wrong motives, its false basis being
proved by its moral decline. Few seem to have
recognised how near it came to be an amazing suc
cess. It failed because it found it impossible to
remain poor. It was a communistic system whose
wealth was its downfall. The reason of its riches,
apart from the lavishing of gifts, which came later,
was due to the fact that it was celibate; there were
no children to be supported. May it not be pos
sible that a family monasticism of the type that
apparently prevailed in early Celtic Christianity of
fers a line that has not yet been worked out?
237

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
Alongside this we may put the multifarious activi
ties of the Mediaeval Church which covered every
need of human life, recreation, insurance, trades
unions, as well as worship and what we now call
religion. Many of the viUages were practicaUy re
ligious communes.
All this raises the question whether some attempt
at communal life might be made among clerics and
in our villages as a start. The objection will be
made that this is putting the clock back. But it
rather looks as if God were going to put it back
for us. History teaches us one lesson that no one
seems yet to have learned, namely, that when
human society develops to a certain extent it has
to be reduced again to a more primitive type of
existence. We can see now that the development
was generally on wrong lines, and it looks as if
God were continuaUy giving man a fresh start.
We may have that opportunity forcibly presented
to us if the war continues; but let us be ready this
time to recognise that it is an opportunity. Some
one may object that this would make the Church
a vast organisation rather than an inspiration; it is
reversing the development by which all these prac
tical concerns have been handed over to the State.
But is it not beginning to dawn upon us that de
velopments may sometimes be wrong, and that this
development certainly is? The Church is shrink
ing to a vanishing point in its influence on modern
238

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
life. It is not inspiring life, not even creating an
atmosphere, save one which some supercilious noses
declare to be that of putrefaction. Religion tends
to get divorced from common life, to develop pseudo-
mysticism and a false spirituality, and common life
gets more and more sordid, hysterical, vicious and
materialistic. The State is not being Christian
ised, the Church is being reduced to a level far
less effective than Freemasonry, and religion is los
ing contact with reality. The State is not doing
the tasks that the Church committed to it half so
well as the Church once did, and the reason is not
far to seek: the State corrupts everything by its
principle of coercion. The construction of a true
order of society, therefore, seems to be the Church's
immediate duty, not to be deputed to any other
power, not to be postponed until some general revo
lution in the social order has taken place, nor to
be attempted on the usual political or coercive lines.
It is here that the Church's salvation may be found.
We turn now to consider the international prob
lem, the problem of how to put an end to war.
It might be thought that this really preceded the
consideration of the social problem, so insistent
has the fearful catastrophe of the war made the
solution of this problem. It must be solved, or
civilisation will perish. For it is obvious that we
are either at the end of war or at the beginning
of a new series, more awful than, even with our
239

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
latest experiences, we can imagine. In the next
war we may see whole continents leagued one against
the other, the last shreds of conventional chivalry
and respect for non-combatants will have been torn
to pieces, and the invention of new forms of de
struction will have reached & development in which
it will be possible to wipe out the inhabitants of a
large town by one explosion, perhaps to poison the
peoples of whole lands. It is surely useless to talk
about the solution of the social problem until we
have got war out of the way.
We have deliberately put the solution of the
social problem first because we believe that the
root problem of war is economic, that it is almost
vain to hope for a peaceful international order
when we have a warring competitive social order.
It is perfectly true that we have made war to
cease between competitive groups by joining them
under one government, but the general development
of industrialism probably demands that war shall
continue in ever-growing fierceness. War has
always been predominantly economic. In primitive
times there was the desire to possess the fruitful
valleys; then, as trade developed, there was a
struggle for the natural highways, the coastline,
good harbours and waterways; now it is for the
areas where there are the richest natural resources
of coal, iron and rubber. Modern industrialism de
mands huge areas for exploitation, wide territories
240

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
for selling its manufactures, and, of course, vast
masses of servile labour. But it may be making
for starvation all the time. The greater profits to
be obtained by mechanical industrialism compete
to the disadvantage of agricultural interests. The
wheatfields shrink as each country gets developed;
tea estates are already being dug up and planted
with rubber; the biggest prizes are to be found at
the remotest distance of actual production. There
is an inevitable end to a civilisation of this kind.
If, therefore, we are going to put an end to
war, we have first to cut some of the roots that
are feeding it: the competitive social order, the
great financial interests which are always working
up diplomacy and sometimes deliberately engineer
ing war scares. But alongside this we have to work
away at the perfecting of international machinery
for settling dispute's as well as getting the mind of
the masses armoured against the immoral appeals
to hate and the age-long delusions and false idealisms
of war.
The strengthening of moral opposition to war is
the strongest of aU protections against it; and this
should be especially the Church's work. But to
this task the Church has yet to be aroused. It is
perhaps not necessary to be too despairing because
in this crisis the Church has treated the Sermon on
the Mount as a "scrap of paper," set out to per
vert the meaning of Christ's cross, and lent the
241

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
whole weight of her religious appeal to the prosecu
tion of the war. It might have been expected that
the Church would have, at least, got as far as rec
ognising that war was an inappropriate method
of spreading religion. Until two years ago every
Church historian would have acknowledged that
the Crusades were one of the greatest blunders and
most unchristian enterprises to which the Church
ever committed herself. We had all come to a
sort of fixed idea that Mahomet's doctrine of con
version by the sword showed how much lower that
religion was than our own. And yet we are told
that this is a holy war, that it is really a fight for
a religious principle, a great crusade against the
forces of evil, the only way of changing the mind
of the enemy. But all the wild statements that
have been made at this time do not represent the
real convictions of the Church, and we shall soon
have these fire-eating parsons and pugnacious pro
fessors cooing as sweet as doves and adopting a
quite different type of Christianity as soon as it
gets popular again. Whether the people will for
get remains to be seen.
Sooner or later the problem of peace and how
to preserve it will be the great problem of the hour,
and then the Church will have to try to say some
thing. It will have a lot of leeway to make up,
but so it had on the social problem. There may
be a similar coquetting with the doctrine of "in-
242

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
differentism" ; the idea that one can be as religious
in war as in peace; that its great sacrifices and
awful death are not incompatible with the peace of
God. But as we saw in discussing the "indifferent"
attitude to social conditions, the real question here
is not whether you can have the peace of God
whUe you are being sacrificed, but whether you
can have it while you are sacrificing someone else.
Soldiers will have to be the witnesses on this
subject, and the problem will probably receive a
somewhat different handling from them than it
receives from theologians who discuss it from arm
chairs. We are told that it is not wrong to kill a
man if that is the only way of restraining him from
evil, and that only those with no faith in immor
tality can regard killing as something very terrible.
These theologians seem to have forgotten that there
is a commandment on this point, number six, which
was not abrogated by Jesus, but rather strengthened
by His advice that we should flee even the temper
that might lead to this sin. It is perfectly true
that to hate may sometimes be morally worse than
to kill, because killing may bring home to a man
the awful consequences of his state of mind;
strange reactions are set at work when you see
your enemy slain at your feet; whereas fireside
haters never repent at all, and their souls contract
blood-guiltiness unrecognised. To argue that there
is a great ethical difference between killing in
243

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
warfare and the killing which we call murder, which
the Sixth Commandment is sometimes restricted to
condemn, may have some ethical justification, but
it is more often on the side of murder. A man
may commit murder for revenge in a fit of passion,
and repent of his wicked deed; the soldier is hired
to kill men with whom he has no personal quarrel,
and may now kill his foe by a machine from miles
distant, seeing nothing of the shattered body which
may be left writhing in agony for days, hearing
nothing of the muttered curses, the calling upon some
beloved name, the dying cry to God, and, there
fore, never having the opportunity to repent, getting
the easiest of all absolutions, that granted by the
State, or by the Protestant professional theologian,
who will take upon himself to say: "I absolve thee
in the name of the Moral Law, the Righteousness
of Defensive Warfare and the Sacred Security of
Society." But we are not among those who regard killing
a man as, in the abstract, the deadliest of sins;
we think that the heavier moral guilt rests on those
who argue as if killing ever were "in the abstract."
We do not look back upon the times when abbots
swung a battleaxe and Church dignitaries led
armies as ages when the Church was morally more
corrupt than now. We think these acts on the
part of the Church have stained her history almost
beyond purging, have corrupted her testimony and
244

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
have deceived the world as to the meaning of Chris
tianity; but they are not so bad in effect as the
soul-destroying arguments by which modern Bishops
and leading Nonconformist Divines try to justify
war — from a distance.
It is warfare by means of machinery and money
that has made war an intolerable moral degradation
for the modern world, poisoning the mind of whole
peoples, making it impolitic to tell the truth, puff
ing up nations with self-righteousness. It is for
its absolutely demoralising effect upon those who
urge , it on from behind the firing-lines that we
must bring it to an end. It has become such an
enemy to conscience and truth that if we cannot
end it, it will leave civilised man without a vestige
of a soul.
Now how is that going to be done? Everyone
is now talking of a League to Enforce Peace, and
some of those very Churchmen who have been most
enthusiastic over the exalting and purifying effects
of war wiU now be found rushing to embrace this
new device which is to remove the possibihty of
war for ever from the world. We believe that
war can be swept from the world, but we have no
desire to live in a world where war has been made
impossible by purely political devices or preventive
force. We do not believe that the Kingdom of
Heaven is going to be established on earth by the
policeman, but by moral consent. We do not
245

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
believe in a heaven where you cannot sin, but oniy
in one where no one wants to. This ought to
appeal to all those who at this time have found it
convenient to sneer at pacifist views as lacking in
bravery and depriving earth of all adventure. We
have no sympathy with those pacifists who want
wars to stop merely because they destroy business,
make shopping difficult, or keep one awake at night
listening for Zeppelins.
But since appeal on higher ground is not at
present open, we may perhaps be allowed to point
out one or two possible effects of the proposed
League toEnforce Peace. In its crudest form, that
of a number of the Great Powers leagued against
any possible threatening Power (which is apparently
all that some of the American sympathisers want,
for they are also supporters of the "preparedness"
campaign), it hardly needs to be pointed out that
this is almost exactly the condition we have now,
for there is only one Great Power not at present
in alliance against the Central Powers. In the
more general presentation of the scheme it is, how
ever, provided that there shaU be a Tribunal to
which all matters of quarrel which were previously
settled by war shall be submitted, and that the
signatories to this arrangement shall pledge them
selves to fight any nation that refuses to submit
its case, or attempts warlike measures before the
prescribed interval for consideration is over. It
246

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
seems to be assumed that there will never be more,.
than one recalcitrant nation at a time, which it
would be easy for the rest of the world to threaten
or coerce. But what guarantee have we that the
nations signatory to the arrangement might not split
up into two almost equally balanced sides? As thus
stated the proposals simply mean that every war
wUl now be a world war, and that if the nations
retain their present armaments as their contribution
to the force which is to secure peace, it would
make every war of a more awful character than we
can imagine. Or if, as is sometimes suggested, the
arrangement should be accompanied by such a re
duction in armaments that it would practically mean
a small police force entirely controUed by the Tri
bunal, then it would be very easy for any recalcitrant
nation to build a fleet or raise an army which could
resist it.
We do not desire merely to criticise any pro
posals that are going to register a real advance in
the moral consciousness of mankind. We do not
urge the objection that, because we believe coercion
to be unideal and always weakening to the moral
advance of man, that there is never any right to
use force. The "police force" which was to keep
the peace of the world would be no more and no
less objectionable than the present police system
which keeps the peace within the State. We be
Heve even that to be below the Christian ideal and
247

The outlook for religion
constantly involving Christian men in injustice and
inducing moral paralysis. If at every difficulty with
our neighbours or threat by evil men we can call
in a policeman it may make for peace and security,
but it is not the peace of God, who is quite wrongly
conceived by British theologians as an Infinite
Policeman whose sole business in this scheme of
things is to enforce obedience to the Moral Law;
and the security thus obtained is hemispheres away
from what our religion calls "salvation."
It is to a great advance in the moral sense of
mankind and to the awakening of a world-wide
religious movement that we must look, whatever
legislation may be attempted or protective devices
constructed. Our Scriptures have set before us the
true ideal. The peace of the world is to be made
by the blood of the cross. In the Ephesian Epistle
there is outlined an application of the Atonement
which we have yet to grasp intellectuaUy and experi
mentally. There the cross is made to reconcile man
to man, to break down hostilities and barriers, and
uniting what was opposed, "reconcile them both in
one body unto God through the cross,"- "so making
peace." 1 We do not profess to be able to under
stand what this means, or to see how it would work
out in actual history, but we do believe that there
is here outlined an unexplored power of the cross
of Christ to bring peace to the world. If only there
^ph. ii. 15, 16.
248

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
could dawn upon Europe at this time that the
war means the crucifying of the Son of God afresh,
and the putting of Him to an open shame, we
might see the fruition of His great sacrifice and
the ending of His travail. For the passage seems
to hint that man must be reconciled to man before
man can be reconciled to God. The war must
mean the crucifixion of Christ, if the Head stiU
suffers with the members.
"Christ dies before us in the war;
The wounded show His mangled hands,
We plait His crown in many lands,
And all the weapons of our pride
Are piercing the Saviour's side."
If above , the smoke of the battle and the lines
of trenches we could really see the cross, so often
pictured by our half-seeing artists for very different
purposes, then men would lay down their arms, the
old enmities would be forgotten in a common peni
tence, the past would be blotted out by the re
pentance of all the nations, and a peace brought
to the world that will certainly never be established
by the way of war. Translate this into what political
terms you like ; it will bear any actuality. It would
mean that nations, convinced at last of their inter
national crimes and false imperialisms, would start
off on a new development, a new rivalry to estab
lish the kingdom of God, a new ambition to follow
Christ, if needs be, to the bearing of the cross.
249

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
There is the hope of the world, and the Church in
every land should be pressing that home upon the
popular imagination now. And let us remember
what the alternative may be. If it is not beneath
the cross of Jesus that nations wiU lay down their
arms, it may be by revolution among the armies and
rebellion among the workers. If we cannot secure
the ending of the war by the blood of the cross,
other blood may flow which will not cleanse but
only cry out for blood the more. But it may need
a crucified Church to bring a crucified Christ before
the eyes of the world.
For let us understand clearly that we are not
going to end war by making people more afraid of
it. War will cease to vex the earth when men no
longer fear it; when they have grown so brave that
not all its horrors affright them. And when the
fear of it goes the preparations for its defence wfil
go too, and when they go war itself wiU disappear.
And we are surely nearly ready for that. Men are
now willing to face almost certain death to gain an
almost completely uncertain end. It only requires
one step more for men to be willing to risk more
for a better cause. And with the stage that war
has now reached, with the utter lack of discrimina
tion between combatants and non-combatants, it is
clear that whatever risks would need to be taken
they would not involve anything worse than war
now means. But even if they did it would be worth
250

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
while. Our belligerent idealists tell us that it
matters not if we are destroyed if only right is
vindicated; they cannot reproach the pacifist for
calling for further risks to be taken in order to save
the world from sin. What the pacifist is concerned
about is not a guarantee against war, but the de
velopment of the genius for making peace when
war threatens or when it is actually in progress; to
oppose the dangers of war by taking the greater
risks of love; meeting the violence of force by the
violence of the Kingdom of heaven. Let us by all
means have alliances, reform our diplomatic service,
secure democratic control of foreign policy, work
for an International Government. Since Tenny
son's prophecy of the
"Nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue"
has come literally true, let us believe that the other
prophecy can be fulfilled :
"Till the war drums throbbed no longer, and the battle
flags were furled
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world."
World Government in matters that affect the whole
world, with plenty of Home Rule and Local Gov
ernment, must be the ultimate solution. But the
finest machinery and most wonderfully devised
government wiU avail nothing unless the heart of
man be changed; and by that we mean what the
251

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
New Testament means, namely, a change of mind,
a different estimate of the aim of life, of what
constitutes happiness, right, honour, duty. Any
arrangements with our present outlook for uniting
the great governments of the world might only leave
the Great Powers for ever sitting on the smaUer
nationalities and the growing nations; might mean
that Europe, America and Japan would league to
gether to enslave China, Africa and South America.
The probability is that, just as the personal re
demption of the world had to be accomplished by
the sacrifice of our Lord, so the redemption of
societies and nations may have to be accomplished
by. the sacrifice of the Church or of some nation.
We are still convinced that the spectacle of some
great nation laying down its arms at a time of
danger, whatever the consequences to itself, would
be an act of moral adventure that would bring
about the redemption of the world from the fear of
war which all these generations has held us in
bondage. But before we can expect any nation to
do that we surely have the right to ask that the
Church shaU set the example first. Any Church
which now began to proclaim the full Gospel of
Jesus Christ would have to suffer persecution, per
haps even to extinction. It will certainly be the
case in the future that members of the Church of
Christ will, in ever greater numbers, refuse to bear
arms. If the Church as a whole were converted
252

THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY
to this doctrine, and an International Agreement
of all Christians to that effect was made, the
Church thus anticipating the Socialists' Inter
national, then we might see the Church of Christ
with every civilised State arrayed against it, arch
bishops and Nonconformist ministers in prison,
not only for resisting the law, but for seditious
alliance with their fellow Christians in enemy
countries. But we should be getting near to a
fulfilment of what the New Testament expected,
and we could wish no better thing for our Church
leaders at this time than that they should be
thrown into prison, shot on the parade ground,
lynched by the mob. They would gain the martyr's
crown, prove their apostolic succession, and we
should recite their names at the Mass, at the
Eucharist, and the Communion as long as the world
endured. When we see any Church becoming a
real danger to the world powers we should know
that that is the one true Church. If this may not
be hoped for, then we do hope to see some order
of men and women loyal to the Visible Church, but
sworn, lifee.the Franciscans are supposed to be, not
to bear arms, not only taking the persecution which
the various States meted out to them, but planting
their communities on all the exposed frontiers and
dangerous places of the world.
But what we want for any of these things is
an International Church. Nearly everyone can see
253

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
that now. All the other Internationals have broken
down; the Labour International, the Commercial
International. The Church must now show that
she can accomplish what they have only attempted.
The chance of being the first to do it wiU soon be
snatched from her. Even belligerent Churchmen
are now beginning to see that national Churches
can become accomplices in national crimes, and
Protestant individualists are getting convinced that
the great hope of the world is not in diplomacy or
armaments, but in a reaUy Catholic Church.

254

IV
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW
CATHOLICISM
Everything that we have been saying leads to one
conclusion: we must have a Church that is united,
that is faithful to Christ, and that is international.
This is but asking in modern terms that the Church
shall be One, Holy, Catholic. These have always
been the great ideals of the . Church which have
moved men, but the trouble is that they have
hitherto been sought in isolation and opposition to
one another. The Catholic stands for the unity of
the Church, by which he has come to mean its his
toric continuity and its centralisation round one
visible head. The Puritan has demanded that at
aU costs holiness shall be secured. The "modern"
Churchman is all for comprehensiveness, the em
bracing of every variety, temperament and, as far
as possible, belief. Each of these ideals, sought
alone, has rapidly deteriorated. For Catholic con
tinuity has come to mean, not the preservation of
the same spirit, but mere mechanical succession or
unchanging rite, while its centralisation has come
to mean an obedience to the Roman See of the most
unintelligent and paralysing kind. Those of us who
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
are not Catholics can see certain great ideas bound
up with the claims of Rome. It is a great thing
to feel that one belongs to the Church that has
come down unbroken from the great years of per
secution, that one is taking part in a service which
never needs to change in any age or country, that
one has a visible leader to whom one can look for
direction. But if we outside can see that the ideal
may be right, whUe its actual embodiment may be
imperfect, cannot Romans begin to meet us half
way by admitting that the continuity of mechanical
contact is at least so doubtful that everything
cannot be made to hang upon it, that the Mass has
undergone great changes and therefore is not fixed
for ever in its present form, and that the Roman
Bishop has based his claims upon bad history, en
forced them by worse methods, and broken the
adherence of many who would have preferred to be
loyal but could not give allegiance to what had
become utterly unlike Jesus Christ? There might
begin to be some movement if we could get as far
as the mutual admission of facts. Protestants might
then begin to admit that they had lost a good deal
at the Reformation, and that they had sometimes
broken step too readily.
To come to the more general ideas held to be
essential by aU "catholic" Churches: the three
fold order of the ministry and the historic episco
pate. Nonconformist Churches have the right to
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EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
say that Catholic Churches do not set forth the
threefold ministry any better than themselves; if
Nonconformists do not have a separate order of
bishops, neither do Catholic Churches really have
a separate order of deacons. It may be that the
threefold ministry is a good order, but it would
help immensely if it were traced not to any original
and unchanging apostolic decree, but to the gradual
direction of the Holy Spirit resident in the Church
guiding it according to developing needs. And
Nonconformists claim that they can get on without
Bishops. They may be desirable; they are not
essential. If they were really representative of the
Church as a whole, if they were elected by the
Church, if it were understood that they bestowed
the grace of orders because that was what they were
commissioned to do by the Church, there would be
room for a new understanding of what orders meant.
But Nonconformists ought also to be reminded that
this modified presentation of the meaning of the
episcopate and orders is going on in Anglicanism,
and that their objections will soon have been met
if the change of conception and emphasis go on
much further.
Similarly with the sacraments. As means to that
perfection which the New Testament calls salvation
they are, in the writer's opinion, necessary, but
there is an opinion abroad, fostered by many
Catholic pronouncements, that they are necessary
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
in order for one to secure the bare minimum of
salvation, namely, inclusion in the care and
concern of God. Over against that there wiU
always have to stand the depleted sacramental
notions of Nonconformity, which really make the
sacraments unnecessary, and the more vigorous
testimony of the Society of Friends and the Salva
tion Army, that the great heights of the Christian
life can be attained without them. So long as the
one extreme claim is made, so long will the ex
treme denial continue. And yet meantime there
is growing up among Nonconformists, and even
among Friends, a longing for sacraments; but they
cannot deny elements in the Christian faith that
seem to them essential in order to gain other ele
ments which seem to others essential.
Rome, therefore, and, in a lesser degree, the
other Catholic Churches, stand in the way to re
union so long as they preserve their present attitude.
But let it not be supposed that we are voicing a
demand that there shall be the wholesale surrender
of sacraments, of episcopacy, or even of papacy.
It is only the Christianisation of them that is asked,
the abandonment of doctrines about them which
reduce the Christian salvation to magic and mech
anism. Reasonable Protestant and Nonconformist
demands might be met without the surrender of
anything vital.
But if Rome stands in the way, so also, it must
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EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
be said, does a good deal in Nonconformity. The
Puritan spirit has made the holiness of the Church
its particular concern, and the Puritan witness has
been necessary and valuable. Its concern that the
Church shall consist of the faithful, that it shall
remain true to its original principles, and that it
shaU be so organised that it is capable of being led
into truth, is one that is stiU necessary. But if we
ask that Catholic Churches shaU do something to
satisfy that demand we have also to ask that Non
conformists shaU recognise that the way they have
pressed their demands has not always been charit
able, and the attempts to secure them amongst
themselves have not attained any greater success
than the pursuit of the other isolated ideals of the
Church. Puritanism has not always developed the
best of tempers, as the constant splits in its own his
tory show. Its tests for holiness have been unreal
and have failed to secure that none but Christians
enter the Church and no Christian is kept out. The
experience of conversion, which has been insisted on
as preliminary to admission to the Church, is one
that cannot be made the subject of any human test.
The test of adherence to a system of theology has
kept many who loved Jesus Christ outside the
visible Church. Beyond that, Puritanism has de
veloped a somewhat morose attitude towards recrea
tion, art, and ritual, and its prejudices have helped
to dimmish the sense of beauty and make our com-
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
mon fife deplorably ugly. It has sometimes been
obstinate, trivial, and made Nonconformity appear
an impossible position, vetoing everything that any
other Church does simply because that Church
does it, refusing to do anything that anyone else
does. But this temper is passing away; the Puritan
spirit now craves a Church which shall be a nursery
and school of saints, and it is willing to recognise
that Catholic Churches do produce a certain type
of saintliness that they cannot produce; that the
sacramental system gives a humility, an awe, an
absence of parade and pompousness that their own
system seems sometimes to encourage. But they
do still demand that there shaU always be room for
free prophecy, for free prayer, .for the freer forms
of worship which they have found do minister to
the spiritual life. Will the other Churches not con
sider these demands? No one asks to-day that the
Catholic shaU abandon his Mass or his Liturgy, or
purge his worship of the supernatural and the mys
tical; but alongside these it is demanded that
there shall be provision for the other types of wor
ship which develop reliance, understanding, and
independence. But Nonconformists must reaUy get
rid of many of their prejudices, their absurd pre
tence that their system needs no admixture of
Catholic ideals, their everlasting claims to be
superior because they can do without so many of
the aids to worship that Catholics confess they
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EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
need. Pharisaism is no sign of spiritual superiority,
nor is cocksureness about one's salvation the same
thing as Christian assurance. Many Nonconform
ists are" quite unaware of the strong devotional
life that exists and nourishes itself on forms that
they themselves despise; and they are probably
equally unaware of a certain vulgarity, irreverence
and indecency that their own type of free-and-easy
worship sometimes begets. They therefore are also
a hindrance to reunion, and we have to make the
same charge of obstinacy, imperiousness and un-
charitableness that we have to complain of in the
attitude of Rome or the rigid Anglo-Catholic.
Our sympathies go out more readily to the liberal
Christian. He rightly demands that no confession
of word or rite can determine whether a man is
a true Christian; he properly refuses to believe any
dogma or accept any theory that shuts out from
the benefits of Christ's passion the morally sincere;
he will not acknowledge that the right of any in
stitution to call itself a Church depends upon the
volubility or exclusiveness of its claims. Judging
from appearances, he is inclined to say that the
louder the claims the less they are worth examining.
Would any real Church have to rely so much on
self-advertisement? It is utterly unlike Christ, who
concealed His claims lest they should prejudice
men's judgment. The modernist wants to see the
ology brought into line with the latest knowledge,
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
and a man's salvation not made dependent upon the
acceptance of creeds which few people can believe
and fewer understand. His claims deserve to be
recognised. The Church has evidently been drawing
the line of demarcation at the wrong place.
But our broad friend is a little bit of a hindrance
too. He sometimes asks us to part with the very
essence of the faith on some supposed discovery,
and to revolutionise theology on what soon proves
to be a quite temporary philosophical system. His
Church membership test sometimes comes near to
a mere demand of respectable character, which
means that he would shut out the harlot and the
publican that Christ said would go into the
kingdom of heaven first. Some of his interpreta
tions of Christ by the sonship that belongs to every
man, and of the cross by the sacrificial spirit that
has displayed itself in all history, obliterate the very
height of the sonship to which He would lift us all,
and overlook that very difference in the sacrifice of
the cross on which the salvation of the world de
pends. Sometimes he is so anxious to make the
Christian faith easy of intellectual acceptance that
he leaves it with no chaUenge to the modern mind,
which is certainly hopelessly astray on many points,
and has helped the world to its present state. We
notice that he girds at dogmas like the Incarnation
and then asks us to swallow the dogma of reincar
nation. He dislikes the miracles in the Gospels, and
262

EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
the next moment he tells us they are all happening
at the Church of Christ Scientist round the corner.
Sometimes he seems to understand any religion
better than he can Christianity. Yet he is often
earnest, has his finger on real difficulties, does pull
the Church up to ask whether it knows itself
what it means. Surely it would be possible to
meet his demands by letting it be understood that,
as a body, the Church was pledged to the highest
interpretation of Christ and His Cross, but letting
it also be understood that the full faith is one that
can only be experienced by those who have entered
the fellowship of the Church and passed through
many phases of thought and experiment. It ought
to be enough to ask that those who seek full mem
bership in the Church do so because they want to
appropriate aU that Christianity can offer them,
and it might be a sufficient article of faith to start
with that they should believe in the institution
they seek to enter, namely, that they believe in
the Holy Catholic Church. That really includes all
else, and does pledge one to loyalty to the visible
body, and to work for its unity, extension, and
prosperity. It is therefore to the endeavour to combine in
one Church the three ideals of unity, holiness and
comprehensiveness, which have hitherto been sought
in opposition, that we must now set ourselves. All
the Churches must come to realise that they have
263

THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION i
been guilty of the sin of schism; not so mucht
that of the external kind, repudiating authority or
pressing claims until they have caused rebellion,
though nearly aU of them in one way or another
have much to answer for even on that count;
but the far worse schism of setting themselves to
minister only to a part of human nature, either
the craving for authority or the demand for free
dom, the longing for mystical communion or the
desire for rational understanding. The Churches
have not only divided the Body of Christ; they
have divided the soul of man. If one sets out in
this modern world to find a Church which shall
provide real spiritual fellowship, one soon discovers
that in every Church that exists we can have free
dom or authority, mysticism or rationalism, the
supernatural or the natural, liturgical or free prayer,
trained and prepared preaching or untrained and
unprepared preaching, a worship dominated by
awe or directed like a public meeting; whereas a
human being wants all these things at one time
or another. But no, I must take my choice; if
I have the one, I cannot have the other; I must
join a denomination which feeds only half my
nature and denies that the other exists, find my
feUowship with people who have only one eye,
make the rest of my spiritual pUgrimage on one
leg. Our modern Churches have become the most
irritating institutions on earth, and they are doing
264

EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
lothing but breeding coteries of most undesirable
people, aU of them narrow, especiaUy those who
boast of their broad-mindedness; trained in par
tiality, drilled to defend a parochial area of religion,
with a fixed and fanatical adherence to one element
of Christianity, and a bundle of prejudices concern
ing all the others. Surely the madness of it all
is now visible and the hunger of man's religious
nature has grown too fierce to be contented
with the unwholesome dietaries the rival Churches
provide. One sees little hope at present for large
schemes of reunion, but one has less patience for
the idea that centuries must elapse before we can
expect anything better; for this patchy and piece
meal Church can hardly last that length of time.
One must rather look for the quickening of the
inner life of the Church, a determination to
know the whole mind of Christ and make aU the
members of the Body loyal to their Head. A
mere closing of ranks, due to economic pressure
or undertaken on the business principle of avoid
ing waste and eliminating competition, wUl bring
no union of the Churches worthy of the name.
What is wanted is a vision of the universality
of Christ, a conviction of the catholicity of
Christianity, the awakening of man's entire
nature. Officials and leaders can have little idea
of the craving for a catholic Christianity that is
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
working among the rank and file; mainly because
it generaUy voices itself in vague discontent, the
poor souls not knowing quite what is the matter
with them, and rushing round to aU the new cults
in turn in a vain search after what they are quite
unaware catholic Christianity amply provides.
Fortunately we have passed the stage when
there wiU be any attempt to unite the Church on
the basis of each denomination surrendering its
distinctive elements and agreeing on a sort of
minimum; a proposal that would leave us with a
religion reduced to its lowest and least interest
ing features. It is the elements for which the
defenders of each system are prepared to die that
have to be understood, represented, and fused to
gether in one Church.
There may come a great revival of religion,
a sudden reformation of some of the Churches,
that wUl bring these hopes suddenly over the
horizon of possibility; but while we may have to
wait for the Divine touch which will alone bring
the consummation of our hopes, there are pre
parations we can undertake that wUl certainly hasten
the day.
We must plead for an extension of toleration;
not only the removal of the last suspicion of State
disability or of social ostracism, but also the de
termination of every Church to think of all other
Christians as partakers of Christ. We do not
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EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
mean that we are simply to recognise that each
Church caters for a certain need, and stands for
a certain truth, and should therefore be left to
go its own way unmolested. That would deprive
us of even that contact which declared hostilities
and a proselytising propaganda afford. If any
Church caters for a certain need and stands for
a certain truth, then it is a need and a truth
no Church can afford to neglect. The true
toleration must initiate the desire to understand
the other position, and try to see if that position
cannot be met from one's own point of view. Let
a Protestant take the doctrines of transubstantia
tion and purgatory, for instance, and instead of
fastening on aU the abuses and errors he can
discover, endeavour to find what need these have
met and whether they contain a core of truth,
and let him see if he cannot translate that truth
and meet that need along the line of his own
principles. Let Nonconformists try to discover
why Anglicans make so much of Episcopacy and
Orders, find what needs they meet and what ends
they conserve, and then see whether he can give
these a meaning and a representation that does
not conflict with his own position. Let the
Roman ask why the Reformation took place,
why some good Christians fear Rome more than
they do the devil, and let him not simply try to
rewrite unfortunate history, even if it has been
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
exaggerated, but rather prove that, perverted or
not, it can never happen again. The modernist
has the impression that Catholicism inhibits him
from serving God with aU his mind. He asks how
the faith is ever to expand if there is no freedom
to explore. Does the Holy Ghost really need the
methods of the Inquisition, and the faith of Christ
require the defence of the Index Expurgatorius?
Let the Anglican try to discover what it is that
makes many of the younger Nonconformists, who
love and admire many things in Anglicanism,
forgo them aU, because they feel the Noncon
formist witness that the Church is not dependent
upon the episcopal system must be maintained;
let them explore the meaning of the Quaker wit
ness that sacraments are not necessary to the spirit
ual life.
After this study of oppositions has accom
plished its work, then let every Church deter-
minately appropriate everything in other Churches
which has been found to feed the spiritual life
and preserve a true witness to Christ. Let the
absurd veto that one Church must not do what
any other Church does be removed; let it be
admitted that there has grown up out of our
Protestant experiments a new catholicity; but let
it also be understood that that catholicity is not
operative until it is represented in every Church.
This movement would reveal that there already
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EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
exists a real unity in diversity, and all that would
then remain to be done would be to feel our way
to a real provision for both unity and variety in one
Catholic Church.
What we crave is a Church in which the sacra
ments are available for aU, declared to be necessary
for the perfect life, but not made coercive and de
clared to be necessary to salvation as that term is
commonly understood. Let us leave room in the
Church for the rise of a prophetic ministry, and
let us make available for that ministry the recog
nition of the whole Church in the form of episcopal
ordination, but let us hear no more of the idea
that without it such ministry is useless, invalid, or
even irregular; the only thing wrong with it is that
it has not been recognised by the whole Church.
EspeciaUy let us hear no more of the necessity for
episcopal ordination where the episcopate itself is
certainly not representative of the whole Church;
whUe, for instance, the Church is stiU divided, or,
as in Anglicanism, the Bishops are appointed by
Prime Ministers, and are not elected by the clergy
or acclaimed by the people. It is a grave question
whether such persons are in real episcopal orders
at all. Let us have a Church where the full historic
faith is maintained, along with an interpretation
that is true to the mind of Christ and as broad as
His heart; but let us hear no more of any idea that
a man shaU perish eternally unless he can accept
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THE OUTLOOK FOR RELIGION
the Athanasian Creed. Surely the Catholic sacra
ments have an attraction of their own, Catholic
practice can defy competition, and the Catholic
faith take care of itself. Give to the whole Church
perfect freedom and provide adequate opportunities
for fellowship and you can leave the rest, to the
Holy Ghost. We want to build a great high wall
dividing the Church from the world, but let there
be three gates on every side, everyone being free
to come in or go out, gates which never need to be
closed, because the light of the Lamb is the only
attraction and the glory of God the only defence.
And if things go wrong, if deniers of the faith
creep in, heresies abound, and hypocrites disgrace,
let us remember that there is only one thing that
can refute and expel them: the superior saintliness
of those who hold the superior faith and the fire of
holiness burning at the heart.
We have said many hard things in this book,
but we have tried to say them impartially about aU
the evils that abound. May we close on another
note and appeal to all Christians to seek to know
what the mind of Christ is on these matters? In
this critical time let us aU set ourselves to inquire
what the wiU of God is for this our day and genera
tion. We have not spoken more strongly than we
have felt; many things will be disputed and re
sented, and there is probably much for which the
writer needs to ask forgiveness, not only from the
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EMERGENCE OF A NEW CATHOLICISM
reader but from his Lord. Yet it is only out of
a free witness that the whole mind of Christ can be
learned; and this is what one quite unworthy and
insignificant person does feel as he looks at the
Church and world in what seems to him the light of
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Bitter
things have been said about all the Churches, but
the bitterness springs out of a passionate love for
the Church, a great faith in what it was meant to
be and can become, and an almost intolerable long
ing for the One, Holy, Catholic Church.
FinaUy, may I appeal in the name of Jesus
Christ our one Lord and only Saviour: first, to his
Holiness the Pope to translate into action some of
the Christlike aspirations he has expressed at this
critical time, abandon all claim to temporal power
and the use of despotic threats, and seriously take
in hand the task of reuniting the scattered flock
of Christ; second, to "his Grace the Archbishop of
Canterbury to abandon the impossible task of trying
to please both the Head of the Church and the
rulers of the State, renouncing the princely life and
abandoning diplomacy; and, finally, to the Leaders
of Nonconformity to drop politics, rid themselves of
historical prejudices, and lead us in the "holy war"
to which Christ is now calling us.

271