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THE CRISIS OF MORALS

By HAROLD BEGBIE

THE PROOF OF GOD

A Dialogue with Two Letters. 12mo, cloth. Net $.75.

The author of " Twice-Born Men " here enters a new field of thought. It is a most effective book — one that will be read and passed on to others. His method of meeting the agnostic and the skeptic is admirable. Here is philosophy presented in con- versational form, pointed and convincing.

TWICE-BORN MEN

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A footnote in narrative to Prof. Wm. James* " The Varieties of Religious Experience."

Frof. William James, of Harvard, says: "Mr. Begbie's book is a wonderful set of stories splen- didly worked up. It certainly needs no preface from me. I might as well call my book a footnote to his."

THE CRISIS OF MORALS

An Analysis and a Programme. 12mo, cloth. Net $.75.

In this indictment of the present wave of social impurity there is no doubt of Mr. Begbie's clear vision nor of his strength of purpose. Why is vul- garity such a power? Why has ugliness got such a tight hold upon us? Why is respectability a failure? and goodness itself so barren and so weak? These are some of the propositions upon which the author has built up an indisputable argument against the easy respectability of the present day.

THE SHADOW

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" The author of ' Twice-Born Men * has again writ- ten a very stirring book — the record of a life that knew wealth and poverty, tears and laughter, inno- cence and guilt, and finally the deep peace of true penitence. There is profound understanding here of human nature in all its heights and depths, and a remarkable grasp also of the psychology of con- version."— Christian Intelligencer.

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JAN 14

The Crisis of Morals

An Analysis and a Programme

HAROLD BEGBIE

Author of " Twice-Born Men "

** Where women are honored, the Divinities are complacent : where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God.'*

New York Chicago Torokto

Fleming H. Revell Company

London

AND Edinburgh

Copyright, I9i4» by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

Then, indeed, will be the stern encounter, when two real and living principles, simple, en- tire and consistent, one in the Church, the other out of it, at length rush upon each other, con- tending not for names and words, or half views, but for elementary notions and distinctive moral

characters.

J. H. Newman.

FOEEWORD

WHAT is written in this place is written chiefly of England, my own country; but the indictment can be brought equally against the United States of America, some of the Dominions, and, in Europe, with unquestionable jus- tice, against the great cities of Germany. So far as I am able to judge from recent reports, a similar indictment might be brought against France and Italy.

I would say at the outset, because I have written what follows with blood rather too heated for a nice discrimination in lan- guage, that while I still insist, after reflec- tion and in cold blood, that Impurity is, indeed, the chief disease of this age, and that the chief danger of civilization does, indeed, lie in a dishonoring attitude to- wards Woman — I would say that I am con- scious throughout this monograph of one

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8 FOREWORD

serious and Tinalterable weakness, the weakness that is possibly found in all strong feeling and in every intense con- viction, the weakness of insisting so ear- nestly on one side of a question that the other side seems as if it had no existence in the writer's mind. Therefore, on the threshold I would ask the reader kindly to carry in his mind the memory of this apology, and to assure himself that the writer who ventures to address him in this little book so clamorously and so fervently is not in reality the despairful victim of a fixed idea, nor a narrow-minded and melan- choly pessimist, but, rather, one who loves life, who feels in the very air the noble qualities of this difficult age, and who be- lieves with real assurance that the hideous and disfiguring disease of the period, which stpreads only because its symptoms are suppressed, will be cured directly it is faithfully attacked. H. B.

CONTENTS

I	The Problem of Social Exist-
	ence	11
n	Where Women are Honored	23
III	The Dominant Passion of
	Women	30
IV	The Tolerance of Evil .	42
V	A Crisis Between Good and
	Evil	65
VI	A Challenge to the Church	74
VII	A Plan of Campaign	87
VIII	The Creative Force of a
	New Idea ....	101
IX	The Telepathy of Purity .	113
X	The Higher Type of Mother-
	hood	123
XI	Eeligion Allied with Sci-
	ence	141

THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE

A QUESTION has come to me, arrest- ing my philosophy of life, hindering my happiness, hammering at the door of my sonl for answer.

Why, the question demands of me, is the problem of social existence still so far from being solved? Why is our science of life still no science at all! Why is it that so much chaos and confusion, so much sus- picion and enmity, so much folly and vul- garity, so much degrading baseness and downright good-hating iniquity still holds us in a nightmare of existence, mocking our hopes, threatening our peace, throwing down the temples of our praise? Why is it that men are not saner, grander, nearer

to divinity? Why is it that life loses its

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dignity more and more, that grace and beauty fall away from us, that human ex- istence still presents to our gaze over so wide a field a spectacle that is ugly, cruel, dreary, and so profoundly disas- trous?

** Our civilizations,'' says George Rus- sell, of Ireland, '^ are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the gran- deur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they grow more urbanized. ' '

Why is it that our moral happiness and attainment so little surpass, if they do, indeed, surpass at all, the happiness and attainment of a thousand years ago?

The struggle of historic man, as Sainte- Beuve said of Pascal's labor, ** attests force, depth, and an ardent, and, so to speak, ravenous, pursuit of truth"; but what is the victory, what is the present reach of this tremendous energy?

To go no further back in history, recall

PROBLEM OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE 13

to your mind tlie shouting and the shining hopes of eighteenth century revolution- aries : trace the rise in the early years of the nineteenth century of the sober, ear- nest and powerful spirit of philanthropy, born of Evangelical pietism, which has now covered the earth with benefactions, which has brought into existence a thousand agencies for human welfare, which has breathed a new spirit into our national existence, creating in this stubborn, slow- moving, conservative nation, a welded na- tional democracy, a social conscience: observe, too, the Churches waking from a long sleep and descending to the lives of the people, not only with a more reason- able and more persuasive theology, but with earnestness, with enthusiasm, and with a human love for humanity: behold the hands of Science spread in blessing over the whole field of our national exist- ence: behold statesman and politician doing real things, and great things for democracy: behold, indeed, the whole orb

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of civilization transformed from what it was a hundred years ago, transformed from top to bottom, transformed, through and through — and ask yourself why, why in spite of all this, is life so unbeautiful, why is humanity so small, why is the heart of man so unsatisfied?

Think of our multiplied efforts to better human life : think of our immense religious activity, our costly philanthropic energy, our furious and heroic political battles; think, too, of the giant strides made by medicine, education, and science, — think of humanity's progress all along that line, and straight in that direction which our forefathers strove to follow and died to reach in search of Utopia, in hope of Mil- lennium,— and then, considering these things, realizing what they ought to mean to the body, heart, and soul of civilization, ask yourself why there is still this deadly disease amongst us making for unrest, spreading ugliness, and destroying enthu- siasm?

PROBLEM OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE 15

Almost every inhTimanity against which Dickens hurled the scorn of his impetuous soul, the abolition of which he surely thought would bring heaven to earth, has been abolished; every serious thing for which the Chartists rose in rebellion is now the commonplace of our political life ; the dreams of the nineteenth century reformers are realized, and more than realized; we have left the landmarks of Victorian Radicalism behind us, and are embarked upon a sea of Socialism — profit- sharing has struck its roots in the sub- soil of industrial life, age is being pen- sioned, workers are insured, the road is laid from national school to university, the State is becoming the doctor, the nurse, the mother of the nation. And with these tre- mendous and wide-stretching political re- forms, there is reformation in the lives of the people — drunkenness is no longer a scandal of national life, disreputable con- duct in public is no longer tolerated in Great Britain, the corruption of an aristo-

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cratic political system has been done away, barriers between class and class have largely been broken down, everywhere there is a wonderful spirit of kindness and good nature, making, if not for brotherhood, at least for charity and tolerance.

Nor have we reached a stage of ex- haustion, a perilous stage in which we rest and congratulate ourselves on what is ac- complished; there is still a pressure behind the evolution of our political existence, there is still a manful determination to march breast-forward, there is still a quickening enthusiasm for humanity, still that saving struggle and endeavor which makes for health as well as for advance. We are still in the act of growth, we are conscious as never before of creative evo- lution, we are inspired, as our forefathers never were inspired, by the instinct for transcendence. Surely there has never been in all the annals of history a period when change gathered so great a momen-

PROBLEM OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE 17

turn, when stagnation so completely van- ished, when the present was so full of ringing blows, and the future so rich with promise of victory.

So rapid now is the movement of prog- ress, so imposing the reports of Govern- ment, that a man who spends his life among the gentle, the cultured, and the kind, might almost think that the gates of Utopia were swinging open and the light of Millennium's dawn shining on the lifted brow of humanity. But to leave our books, to come from our study, to forsake the so- ciety of our gentle friends, and to go a journey through the mighty world at our very door, — this is to discover that the towers of Utopia are yet hidden in fuliginous clouds, and the dawn of Millen- nium blackened and obliterated by a night as dark as paganism.

It is not only the misery of the very poor that rebukes optimism and destroys hope; it is not only the exhalations of poverty and wretchedness which choke satisfaction

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and silence thanksgiving: one is not broken-hearted and cast down merely by the squalor of the underworld. There is something in the model town of a philan- thropic manufacturer which chills and de- jects us — something lacking, some soul, some spirit, some touch of love and divinity missing, which leaves its orderly respect- ability and its mathematical efficiency dull, wearisome, tedious, and depressing. And it is the same in that vast environment of the metropolis, which we call the suburbs, the same in every otiose quarter of every city and town throughout the country. One is not merely shocked by the coarseness of a holiday crowd, not merely sickened by the degradation of a racing mob, not merely depressed by the soullessness of great masses of mankind seeking their pleasure and finding their delight in un- worthy amusement; no, it is not this only which makes for disillusion and dejection. One is stopped dead in the triumphant march of political optimism by the miser-

PROBLEM OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE 19

able littleness in prosperous humanity of all that which had seemed to us in theory the crowning glory of the race.

If one listened in a dream to the Lau- damus of Heaven, and then awoke to hear that strain of immortal adoration trans- lated into a drawing-room ballad and sung by a woman grotesquely dressed in the last excesses of prurient sensualism : or if one saw in a moment of spiritual exaltation the face of a shining angel, and came out of ecstasy to find that glorious face dis- figured on our glaring city walls in the service of some swindling and corrupting advertisement: or if a man who had cher- ished in a far land the ideal of a perfectly beautiful and perfectly holy mother, re- turned after many years to find her hor- rible with sin or hideous with vulgarity — such disillusion would scarcely exceed, would scarcely more depress and more em- bitter than the disillusion of the political optimist who goes to humanity for the proofs of our social progress. ^ ^ If I looked

20 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

into a mirror,'' said Newman, '' and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into this living, busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator."

But why, why is man not happier, nobler, diviner, after the immense effort of humanity to lift up its head and behold the stars'? Why is life not more beautiful, more dignified! Why is vulgarity such a power? Why has ugliness got so tight a hold upon us? Why is respectability a failure, and goodness itself so barren and so weak?

This is the question that haunts and mocks me, and hammers at my soul for an- swer. I have dreamed so many dreams, I have clung so spontaneously and so pas- sionately to optimism, I have hated so hon- estly, and so contemptuously the cynic, the scoffer, and the pessimist, and in myself, at the very centre of my being, I am still so conscious of joy in existence, so grateful for the gift of life, that I cannot think,

PROBLEM OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE 21

I will not believe, there is no answer, no clear and solving answer to this question. Wisdom has taught me in many a hard and difficult hour not to seek far afield for an- swer to these questions of the soul, not to mount upward from the earth on the wings of philosophy, not to forsake man's abiding place, not to depart from the com- mon heart of humanity. If there is an answer to this question it must be one that the least of men can understand, the low- est of men be brought to acknowledge; it must be an answer that will solve the prob- lem of life for the most ignorant, the most stupid and the most helpless. Not by go- ing a great journey, or by doing a difficult thing, is happiness to be found. Life with all its difficulties and with all its mysteries and with all its splendors and squalors, is hidden and imprisoned in the individual heart of man. And not only this human life, which we find so difficult, but the eter- nal life which shall make amends for our bitter sufferings and our thousand pains.

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*^ The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. ' '

It is in the heart of man that we must search for our answer. ^' The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.''

II

WHERE WOMEN ARE HONORED

IS it possible that the answer is simple : not only simple, but old with the ages of antiquity: an answer given many centuries ago by an Eastern seer?

'' WHERE WOMEN AEE HONORED, THE DIVINITIES ARE COMPLACENT : WHERE THEY ARE DESPISED, IT IS USELESS TO PRAY TO GOD.^'

Where women are honored

Like a strong light brought suddenly into a darkened room, a strong and steady flame which reaches into the farthermost corners and chases away the blackness, leaving no single shadow that had been left by a lesser light, this answer solves for me the riddle of the question and il- lumines the whole region of our social

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existence. It leaves for me no shadow, no corner of darkness, no ghost of vague per- plexity. It shines through the obscurity that baffled, and the darkness that op- pressed, it lights up the nearest doubt and the remotest objection; verily it seems to me the true answer. Woman is the Secret : man's attitude to woman, the decisive fact of human life.

We have been like a musician who at- tempts to tighten the strings of his violin without attention to the bridge. We have tightened, we are still laboring to tighten, the string of education, the string of sci- ence, the string of physical development, the strings of political and religious effi- ciency. But we have forgotten to examine the position of the bridge over which all these strings pass, on which they rest, and without which they can produce only dis- cord. We have forgotten Woman. We have left out of our count the very bridge' of life.

Have you ever thought what woman is?

WHERE WOMEN ARE HONORED 25

Have you ever set yourself to comprehend, so far as mystery of such wonder can be held in thought, what it means to be the mother of humanity? Have you ever con- sidered that it is not poetical exaggera- tion nor rhetorical hyperbole to speak of woman with something of the same rever- ence as we employ to speak even of God? *^ Earth's noblest thing," ^^ the holiest thing alive '' — these are not empty phrases ; they are the only rightful tributes man can pay to the mother of mortality. Woman in her purity, woman in her mys- tery, woman in her inmost sanctity, is earth's noblest thing, and is the holiest thing alive.

Thrust out of your memory all bitter, cynical, and taunting things said about women; forget, so far as you can, the de- graded and the trivial women who have touched your life, either for disappoint- ment or evil; stand clear, though it be for a moment, of all this vulgar, hateful, and disgusting show of modern life, and con-

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sider what it is to be a woman, what it is to be the mother of mankind.

See the absolute Woman with your eyes clear of local prejudice and contemporary experience: see her as the fountain of life at the dawn of human existence, whose body carries the sons of men, whose soul broods upon her burden like the sacred dove, whose breasts nourish that holy stream of life which God has ordained should water the earth and reflect the stars. What depth of wonder in her eyes, what infinitude of love in her smile, what heavenly healing in her caress! Can you see in that pure brow the mark of vileness, hear in that tender voice the luring tones of practised coquetry, imagine in the em- brace for her child the shuddering im- purity of a sold and hated iniquity?

Is it not as manifest as the sun in Heaven that her soul lives in the child of her heart, that the whole earth exists only as the floor for his venturings, that the stars are not numerous enough for the

WHERE WOMEN ARE HONORED Tt

lives she would bestow upon him? Can you persuade yourself to think that aught on earth might compare in her heart and mind with this child of her body, or so sat- isfy the cravings, so employ and sanctify and rejoice the solicitude of her being?

Surely to be Woman is to be one with Nature, Nature that has evolved in that frail and gentle form the very soul of her own birth-throes — conscious, personal, in- carnate Motherhood. Surely to be Woman is to feel deep living and quivering in the heart, the vibration of Nature's final pang and attaining agony — that final pang, that attaining agony which opened the gates of life and crowned creation with divinity. Whatever else may be found in Woman this must be there, and this in the ultimate analysis must be regnant. Woman is the source of existence, the mother of the ages. She stands at the beginning of time, on the dust and drift of subsiding chaos, in the first dawn of emerging beauty, with a child at her breast; and to be the mother of

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humanity, to feel for ever through the lips of that child at her breast the giving of herself to the purposes of God, this was, this is, and this ever shall be, at once the ministry of Woman and the consecration of mortality.

Are we not like madmen lost in the mazes of a dream, or as men enticed by evil spirits into a wilderness of illusion, that we should think of Woman except as the Mother of Humanity, that we should find in our hearts for this sacred fount of mortal existence, aught save honor, reverence, and love*?

Is it possible that all the ills of life flow from this one irreverence, that our blas- phemy of this sacred maternity is the one great sin that crosses all our good with evil, and all our struggle with defeat! Where women are honored, the Divinities are complacent: where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God,

Is it possible, too, that our irreverence for women, our light, frivolous, or cynical notions concerning women, are founded

WHERE WOMEN ARE HONORED 29

upon a most shallow ignorance, and that the whole corruption and defilement of women — spreading this universal ruin — flows from one single delusion so trans- parently and demonstrably a delusion that it should not cheat even a clever fool?

Ill

THE DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN

GOD is infinite/' says Coventry Pat- more, '' all else is indefinite, ex- cept woman, who alone is finite, and in her God and all things find their repose. She is Regina Coeli, as well as Regina MundiJ^

If you doubt this sacred character of Woman, compare in your mind the highest term we have invented for her, the word Mother, with that lowest term of disgust and contempt which men use to designate the courtesan. What do we mean by the phrase a fallen woman? A fallen woman I Fallen from what! Why is it we say fallen?— why is it that even the most com- passionate cannot think of a fallen woman

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DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN 31

without shuddering and disgust? How is it that men, the most coarse and the most base, speak with scorn of a public woman? Is it not because, consciously or sub-con- sciously, men see in a disreputable and a bad woman the contradiction of an original ideal, the disappointment and the disillu- sion of a natural, an inherent, and an 65- sential passion of the soul?

It is necessary for mankind to have in the world a Queen of Earth, a visible em- bodiment of God's evolution and provi- dence ; and only in Woman can we find this finite incarnation of creative love, — and in her God, and all things find their repose. But what becomes of the realm when the Queen smirks in the gutter?

To restore Woman to her throne, to crown her afresh with honor and rever- ence, is almost to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to this troubled and disordered earth. Nor need men despair of such a consummation, saying that the thing is a visionary's dream. No revolution is

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needed for this coronation of Woman ; our business is a return to nature, a return to God, a change in the attitude of man's

mind.

For although Woman is Regina Miindi, and although from her soul, be it holy or corrupt, proceeds the sovran influence on mankind — for it is women, not men, who set the fashion of life and give the tone to social existence — nevertheless, women are chiefly what men desire them to be, they are at once the mothers who respond to the least cry of their children, and the slaves who answer with obedience to their master's call.

If, then, man desires to restore Woman to her throne, he need not seek to change her, but must set himself to change his own attitude of mind towards this sensi- tive, answering, receptive, and impression- able creature in whom God and all things find repose.

And to do this it is, above all other things, necessary at the present hour that

DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN 33

men should profoundly assure themselves that a bad woman is, indeed, a fallen woman, that lust in woman is non-natural, that even lightness, frivolity, and coquetry are the artificial and transitory effects of a civilization falsely based on the founda- tions of an intervening barbarism. In her origin Woman is Mother. She is pure, she is chaste. She represents to mankind the love of Heaven.

If your mind is so clogged with the cinders of vice or so saturated with the poison of cynicism that you start, as if from a blow, at this essential proposition : if you laugh in your dark mind as though I proposed to you a thought at variance with the whole history of human experi- ence: if you would immediately push me out of your broad way as one who is the foolish victim of hallucination: if you pos- sess in your soul no memory of a veritable mother that gives pause to this hasty and impatient judgment: if you have in your heart no hope of such love from woman as

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transfigures life and lifts the sonl of man to Heaven — at least stay to face this mani- fest and arresting truth that in the whole sphere of the animal world there is no female thing without the instinct for ma- ternity, no creature that can be remotely likened to a fallen woman.

Among the creatures of the earth there is no single thing even faintly resembling a courtesan. Throughout nature, the fe- male has but one passion, which is the reproduction of her kind: the higher creatures mate, and in some cases mate for life, only for the family : lust in itself and for itself is known, and even so with a vast difference, only among those ani- mals domesticated by man, who, artificially fed and unnaturally conditioned, suffer a perversion such as is found in horrible excess among corrupted, unredeemed hu- manity.*

* Professor Wallace has pointed out that the cruelty of the cat towards a mouse is the result of domestica- tion. If the cat were hunting for food in a wild state, she would kill the mouse with one blow and eat it

DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN 35

Does not this knowledge at least give pause to your cynicism, does it not set a question at the door of your ignorance which your soul, suffocating and exhausted to the point of death, struggles to answer?

Look on the earth and see for yourself. Leave your books, your newspapers, your plays, your habits of a lifetime, and con- sider this wild garden of creation as it presents itself to man's contemplation, even in this day, with the freshness, the beauty, and the sanctity of a divine love. What is it that you see there, first and foremost!— is it not the mighty, unending and superb effort of reproduction conse- crated by the devotion and self-sacrifice of Maternity, innocent of lust? Where do you find among the creatures of the earth a vile and perverted thing like a fallen woman? WTiere do you find among the animals a search after lust in itself and for itself? Where do you find among the

immediately. She only plays with the mouse because she is not hungry.

ly

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creatures liigliest in the scale of being an indifference to maternity?

Take this truth into your soul and see where it will lead you — Purity is natural, Impurity is non-natural.

But you have an objection ready to your mind, bom of that base, ignorant, and shal- low cynicism which speaks of '^ the oldest profession in the world,'' which delights to ascribe to women all the sins and evil of mankind. You turn from nature, and you point to the cities of the world. Women are thus and thus. They have been so from ancient times. There is no literature in the world that does not depict them in these scarlet colors.

Do not forget, at the outset, that the written histories of great men are only the sequels to the unwritten lives of good mothers. Do not forget that from the be- ginning, and in every literature of the world, virtuous women have existed, have been reverenced, have been exalted even by poets who saw no sin in lechery.

DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN 37

Do not forget that men have ever been shamed by vicious mothers, that no man who ever lived has yet gloried in having a Messalina for his mother, a Lais for his sister, a Jezebel for his wife. Do not for- get these things when you speak of '' the oldest profession,'' and point to the streets of cities and the intrigues of society to vindicate your contention that women are naturally vicious.

But I meet you where you stand, and I challenge you on that very ground. The streets of great cities are thronged by these fallen women, and society is honeycombed, as it were with some cancerous disease, by the creeping social poison of adultery. Yet you will find that women are thus, after centuries of servility, chiefly because men have driven them into infamy. Be not deceived; women are what men have forced them to be, what men wish them to be, when necessity urges, they make pre- tence to he what men desire them to he. The most tragic example of this universal

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truth is to be found in the awful commerce of harlotry; it is known by those who work among these fallen women that they toil broken-hearted at this unthinkable trade, hating the hideous debauchery of their bodies, masking their frightful ennui and their spiritual disgust, deceiving brutal men (because it pays them) into the delu- sion that they are thus because their na- tures are thus. With overwhelming force and shattering rebuke this terrible argu- ment strikes the mouth of the man who hugs to his heart the defiling delusion that women are vile, even as he himself is vile. The harlot acts a lust she never feels.

And among those faithless women who deceive their husbands and desecrate their motherhood, how many are there who would not a thousand times rather possess husbands they could love and reverence, children whom they could look fairly and purely in the face? How many of these married courtesans, in spite of the unnatu- ral conditions of their lives, in spite of the

DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN 39

deadness bred in their souls by the rush of social excitement, are really and perma- nently vicious! Perhaps three, perhaps two, perhaps one in a hundred.

Look the truth of existence in the face. Your eyes deceive you when you watch sunrise and sunset ; men lived for millions of years surrounded by magnetic currents without knowledge of electricity; is it not possible that your corrupt heart deceives you about the nature of women?

This is the great delusion of base and frivolous minds, that women are by nature light of love, that they are not by nature and instinct and desire as pure as the purest mother. And there is no way of changing man's attitude towards woman, outside the redeeming influence of religion, so strong and so convincing as the spread and increase of this one idea: — Purity is natural ; impurity is unnatural.

Women are by nature chaste; the reg- nant passion of a woman's heart is ma- ternity.

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All the bad and wicked women in tlie world are perversions; all the frivolous, prurient, and immodest women of society- are the artificial productions of unnatural conditions. The good mother is the norm.

Purity, then, is not something to which mankind must reach forward; it is some- thing to which mankind must go back. Impurity is not something which rose from the slime with the first parents of the human race; it is a disease which human- ity has contracted on its departure from nature. The harlot does not exist as a survival of human origin; she is of all things on earth the most unnatural, th^ most lawless, and the most solitary. Every phase of lust is a perversion of natural, rightful, and beautiful passion.

If women are to become the great mothers of a great posterity, man must change his attitude towards them. If life is to be better and grander, women must be better and grander; and for women to be better and grander man must desire

DOMINANT PASSION OF WOMEN 41

them to be better and grander. Women will be what men wish them to be; to change women we must convert the atti- tude of men towards women.

All social progress leans upon this al- teration of men^s attitude towards women. The aim of religion and of politics is Brotherhood ; but you cannot have Brother- hood without Motherhood.

IV

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL

THERE is in the world at the present time, underlying all our seriousness and frivolity, all our heroics and cynicism, a deadly disease of impurity. It is so widely diffused, so deeply fastened into the vitals of the community, that those physicians of the social state who strive to save the soul of humanity, and who best know the world's health, almost despair of a cure. This dreadful leprosy of unnatural impurity, taking a hundred forms, is creeping through the whole body of the state, in its violent and most deadly shape is attacking even some of those who are guardians of religion. For every scan- dal, and for every suppressed scandal, men who know the truth of this matter are

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THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 43

aware of twenty cases worse and worse. Some malignant enchantment seems to be thro^^^l over the minds of mankind by this devil of impurity, so that those who are honorable in all things else, who are lovers of beanty, who are followers of religion, and who shrink from ugliness or coarse- ness with most honest horror, pitch head- long into the deepest infamy of all. And men who would not break their word to a man, who are trusted and liked and ad- mired by a circle of honorable men, will yet creep into the shameful places of the town to buy at all costs the ruin of a child.* If it were possible to tell the tale of these things, such a book might be writ- ten as would lacerate the soul of Christen- dom. Horror could be piled upon horror, bestiality upon bestiality, devilry upon devilry, until the accumulated vileness of mortality would draw a scream of protest

* In my ovm experience I know of a little child, four years of age, who was kept for immoral purposes in a house of ill-fame. This babe was rescued by a lady, but was kidnapped again, and has never been heard of since.

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from tlie pure. If the conscience of the civilized world was shocked by revelations concerning the slave trade, or by the bar- barities of the factory system in days be- fore factory legislation, how much more should it be shocked by these revelations of the soul of man in the sphere of mortal apostasy? Nor would these horrors be drawn only from the pit of Acheron, from the demoniacal perversions of creatures so cankered of soul that the putrefaction of their immoralities is like the blight and corruption of death; they would be drawn from every section of society, from such different arms of our national existence as the Navy and the Priesthood, from the most famous schools, from the most re- spectable circles of society, from every rank and condition of mankind. More than this : a society of fashionable women might be named which exists for feminine de- pravity, which is organized for its in- credible horrors, even as the White Slave Traffic is organized throughout the world.

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 45

More even than this : men might be named in religion who have received preferment in spite of notorious reputations, — a Cabinet Minister once denounced in my hearing, and before a group of men, a cer- tain clergyman, calling him by the hardest and most brutal name an evil beast can earn, and that clergyman has since been promoted to a more conspicuous sphere of labor.

But I need not hint and suggest at things which every man of the world knows full well. Though every spluttering sycophant of the age and every adjusting, tolerant, and fruitless philosopher should strive to dismiss my charge as exaggerated, those who truly know the condition of modern society, those who are veritably acquainted with the iniquities of the time will ac- knowledge that these hints and suggestions give no adequate adumbration of the blackness hidden and concealed behind the decent candles of hypocrisy. And let a clean-hearted, healthy-minded man declare

46 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

whether there is not evidence overwhelm- ing enough of this age 's prurience in things which are publicly done and publicly tolerated. What an indictment against our minds might be brought even from placards and advertisements: what proof that we regard woman only from one single point of view might be adduced from plays and novels : what a commentary on our re- ligious and social life might be found in the fashion of women's garments, the amusements of society, and the windows of shops.

I will take but one example, — simple, commonplace, and therefore, the most con- venient for my purpose. During the last few years the billboards of nearly every city in the land have exhibited a commer- cial advertisement, which represents the kiss of a man and woman, — a kiss of sur- render and abandonment. Now, these pic- tures are known by every honest man and woman to be impure. But let any one raise his voice against such exhibitions, and the

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 47

great newspapers are silent, while the baser newspapers — usually connected with some pander of the racing world — immedi- ately raise a shout against '' Puritanism," crying out that to the pure all things are pure, gartering themselves with the chiv- alry of Edward the Third, and heaping upon the critic every term of disdainful and contemptuous opprobrium to which their addled intellects can reach. But in spite of this transpontine hypocrisy, every one knows perfectly well that the adver- tisement is there to catch attention, and that the purpose of the advertiser is to catch attention by appealing to a powerful human instinct. There is just as much prurience and calculated lechery in such advertisements as in the songs and dances of an Indian temple-girl. The appeal is deliberately made to animal passion. Every one knows this, and there it is.

Now, I mil not ask why a man who has brought up his daughters in pure, beauti-

48 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

ful, and refined surroundings, should suf- fer in bis excursions through the streets these public affronts to their modesty, nor will I inquire what effects such exhibitions are likely to produce in the minds of un- happy boys fighting in the sweat of their soul against the evil tendencies of over- civilized human nature. My purpose in citing this particular impurity of the bill- boards is to charge the age with a lack of decency, with a want of modesty. I say that here, in a very plain, public, and defi- nite instance, is demonstrable proof that we are losing that essential reticence and that necessary restraint in the moral sphere which characterize a pure, chival- rous, and dignified attitude towards woman. The kiss of man and woman where it is pure, is sacred ; where it is im- pure, it is as vile as hell is itself. To make public exhibitions of a pure kiss is like a blasphemy: it is like using the Eucharist for an advertisement; to make public exhibitions of an impure kiss is an

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 49

obscenity: it is like opening a sewer to attract the flies.

Let the Philistines and the tolerant '* clinkered souls '^ of our baser journal- ism say what they will, these apparently simple, apparently innocuous, and appar- ently innocent advertisements are symp- toms of moral decay. They witness to an itching and an inflamed condition of that part of man's nature which it is one of the highest interests of civilization to keep purged and clean. They prove that reticence in sexual matters is at the be- ginning of an abandonment whose logical development is towards animalism. If a kiss may be exhibited, everything may be exhibited. A man, Coleridge teaches, can- not stop at the animal ; if he is not moving onward to be an angel he is moving back- ward to be a devil. These veiled and mas- querading impurities of the billboards do not witness to progression, but to retro- gression : their most lustful defenders mil not asseverate that they mark an advance

60 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

towards spiritual greatness : the most care- less, the most tolerant, the most lazy will not deny that they are animal in origin and design. Where will they lead ? If they are suffered, what will be the next backward step?

Suppose this want of reticence and re- straint— obvious in certain advertise- ments, in certain plays, in certain novels, in the grotesqueries of women's gar- ments— proceeds unchallenged and un- checked. Suppose we come to the conclu- sion that no curtain should remain on its rings, no door should be kept locked, no veil should be drawn over the privacies of human nature? Suppose we agree that each man is a law unto himself, that life is an opportunity for sensual enjoyment, that not a single individual amongst us owes allegiance to God or responsi- bility to posterity. What will be the end?

The end will be that chief horror which has affrighted philosophy and terrified re-

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 51

ligion. It will be a world organized for evil.

The husbandman sows wheat and tares come up with it ; but when the husbandman sows tares, where shall men look for the bread of life!

Till now, mankind has held that virtue is higher than vice, that love and sacrifice are holier emotions than self-assertion and self-indulgence, that purity and modesty are graces of the soul which are more seemly and which more uplift humanity than all the swinish propulsions of our animal nature. But now it has become bombastic and clap-trap to speak of duty; for a young girl flung into the swirl of society, modesty and reticence are weights that sink her out of sight ; to be impudent, to be immodest, to be daring, to be utterly and completely self -minded — this is to float on the surface and attract the iridescent scum. Life is regarded as something less than a game — it is a jig and a spree. To think only of oneself, to have ^' a good

52 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

time/^ to be free of responsibilities, to stand clear of duty, to avoid seriousness, to laugh, to dance, to push, to jostle, and to chatter the gospel of solipsism in a maze of sensual distractions, — this is to be mod- ern, this is to be abreast of the times. And from the coarseness of plutocracy, this spirit descends through the middle-classes and the suburbs to the sphere of the hum- blest people. Family life is no longer the central happiness of humanity. A child is no longer counted the supreme blessing of human existence. Home is ceasing to be the anchorage of mankind. The birth-rate falls like a weather-glass under a lowering sky.

Look where you will the spirit of ^' I •Myself '' is paramount. Life exists for Me : all the dim aeons behind have toiled to produce Me : this brief moment in the eter- nal duration of time is only an opportunity for My pleasure and My ease : I care not a jot for the ages ahead and the sons of men who shall inhabit the earth when I am dust

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 53

beneath their feet. Give Me My Eights. Stand clear of My way. t want, and I will have.

Is it not clear to you from this spirit of the age — manifest with brutal coarseness here, with subtlety and refinement there — that the hour of ^^ the stern encounter '* is approaching! *^ The stern encounter when two real and living principles, sim- ple, entire, and consistent, one in the Church and the other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not for names and words, or half views, but for elementary notions and distinctive moral character. '^

If you think that this encounter is not at hand, that virtue is still safe, that one need not alarm oneself unduly, reflect for a mo- ment on the revolution in dancing, and the revolution in man's attitude towards this social diversion. Consider that even those critics who laugh at the Puritan's disap- proval of sexual dancing are forced to con- demn the modern dances which frankly

54. THE CRISIS OF MORALS

and shamelessly seek to imitate the bodily passions of birds and animals. Think what it means that these filthy and las- civious dances are tolerated in private houses, that they are laughed at and cari- catured in the newspapers as though they were merely an absurdity of fashion! Does this not strike you as a symptom of real decadence, a sure sign that modesty and restraint are no longer respected, a certain proof that Christ's spiritual purity of the heart is not even taken into consid- eration by the world?

I will quote in this place a paragraph from a recent number of The Observer, a Sunday paper, and a paper that is read by the most literate, refined, and serious classes. It will be seen that this paper describes a reply to a distinguished clergy- man's rebuke of immoral dancing as '' an amusing article " — amusing! — and that the article in question, while objecting on the score of taste to the most disgusting of sexual dances, is in truth a light, flippant.

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 55

cynical, and shallow reproof to the * ' Puri- tans ": —

MoKALs OF Dancing.

** THE MOST HAEEMISH OF PASTIMES.''

Canon Newbolt's sermon against de- cadent dancing is the theme of an amus- ing article in the New Statesman, which, premising ' the history of human prog- ress might be interpreted as a prolonged conflict between the preachers and danc- ers,' goes on: —

*' It is not difficult to see the reason why the preachers are so doubtful about the dancers. It is simply that dancing is for the most part a rhythmical panto- mime of sex. It is the most haremish of pastimes. We are not surprised to learn that Henry VIII. was the most expert of Koyal dancers. He was an enthusiast for the kissing dances of his day, indeed, long before ever he had abandoned his

56 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

youtliful straitness for the moral code of a farmyard that had gone off its head. We can imagine how a preacher with his craft at his fingers' ends could de- duce Henry's downfall from those first delicate trippings. . . .

^* What, then, is a reasonable attitude to adopt towards sex dancing? Obvi- ously, we cannot abolish sex, even if we wished to do so. And, if we try to chain it up, it will merely become crabbed like a dog. On the other hand, there is all the difference in the world between putting a dog on a chain and encouraging it to go mad and bite half the parish. There is nearly as wide a distance separating the courtly dances of the eighteenth cen- tury from the cake-walk, and the apache dance from the Irish reel. Priests, we know, in whom the gift of preaching has turned sour, have been as severe on in- nocent as on furious dances. But this is merely an exaggeration of the prevail- ing sense of mankmd that sex is a wild

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 57

animal and most difficult to tame into a fireside pet.

"■ It is upon the civilization of this ani- mal, none the less, though not upon the butchering of it, that the decencies of the world depend. And this is exercise for a hero, for the animal in question has a desperate tendency to revert to type. One noticed how the eye bulged with the memory of African forests when the cake-walk affronted the sun a few years ago. The cake-walk, we ad- mit, seemed a right and rapturous thing enough when it was danced by those in whose veins was the recent blood of Africa. But when young gentlemen be- gan to introduce it as a figure in the lancers in suburban back-parlors one re- sented it, not merely as an emasculated parody, but as an act of dishonest inno- cence.

** But everywhere it has been the tend- ency of dancing in recent years to be- come more noisily sexual. We do not

58 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

refer, as might be imagined, to the danc- ing in undress which for a time captured the music-halls. That, we believe, is almost the least sexual dancing we have had. The dancing of Isidora Duncan was of as good report as a painting of old Sir Joshua. We may pass over the Russian ballet, too, because of the art which often raised it to beauty, though it amuses one to speculate what St. Ber- nard would have thought of Nijinsky. But, as for ragtime, it is a silly madness, a business for Maenads of both sexes; and all those gesticulations of the human frame known as bunny-hugs, turkey- trots, and the rest of it are condemned by their very names as tolerable only in the menagerie.

*^ On the other hand, because the bunny in man and the turkey in woman have revived themselves with such im- pudence, are we to get out our guns against dancing I Far from it. One is not going to sacrifice the flowery grace

THE TOLERANCE OF E\IL 59

of Genee, or Pavlova, with her genius of the butterflies, because of the multitude of fools. All we can do is to insist upon the recognition of the fact that dancing may be good or bad, as eggs are good or bad, and to remind the world that in dancing, as in eggs, freshness is even more beautiful than decadence. Per- haps some of the performances of the Eussian ballet would come off limping from such a test. Opinions will differ about that. In any case, we cannot help the logic of our belief. Each of us, no doubt, contains something of the preacher and something of the dancer; and our enthusiasms depend upon which of the two is dominant in us.''

Is there not in the whole spirit of this extract, so patronizing and superior to religion, so generous and indulgent to ** the most haremish of pastimes,'' clear witness that morality no longer exercises authentic sway in public opinion? ** It

60 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

amuses one to speculate what St. Bernard would have thought. ..." But there is a higher than St. Bernard. What does Christ think? Are we to stop our amusing speculations at St. Bernard? Apparently, yes. The religious aspect is merely to be glanced at, and only then in a moment of amusement. *^ What, then, is a reasonable attitude towards sex in dancing? "

Not in this spirit would our fathers have written of dances which are loathsome to the point of nausea, inhuman to the point of devilry. A healthy mind sickens at these lascivious things, a religious mind shudders with something deeper than dis- gust. They are not only insolent and dirty-minded, they are a blasphemous mockery of Gethsemane, a devilish and most blasphemous derision of Calvary. Christ is not a character in fiction, not a tradition in art, not a convention in morals ; He is the great and central Reality of human existence. He lived. He suf- fered, and He died for man. Brought into

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 61

the light of that Incarnation, how can men of reason look upon these dances except with utmost horror and indignant shame? Are they not blasphemous and infernal? Nevertheless, it is not so much these mock- ing and derisive orgies of sex which startle us and fill us with apprehension; it is rather the spirit of public opinion which tolerates and accepts them so easily, which can write about them in respectable news- papers *^ amusingly, '' and which seeks ^\ith indulgent smile to discover the * ' rea- sonable attitude '' towards them.*

What most astonishes, perhaps, is that no one seems to be ashamed of these popu- lar lecheries. There is no scandal about them. No sense of horror or guilt. Even those who disapprove never regard them from the religious standpoint which re- veals them in their naked and rampant lasciviency. These shocking and abomi- nable exhibitions of unchastity, which

* It has just been announced that a new club is to be opened in London for dancing, a club which will be open all night as well as all day.

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should call the whole Church to arms, are really no more intolerable to public opin- ion than a folly in women's dress.

And it is, of course, to this perilous con- dition of public opinion, rather than to the actual things themselves, that I would di- rect the reflection of the reader. I am not so much horrified and disgusted by the dirty-minded photographs which have ap- peared so continuously in the popular newspapers this summer — one respectable paper exhibited a picture of a man peer- ing through the keyhole into a woman's bathroom — nor am I so horrified and dis- gusted by these haremish dances, by the immodesty of pictorial advertisements, by the prurience of feminine fashions, by the presence of fallen women and painted boys in the public streets; what chiefly disturbs me is the absence of public protest, the quiescence of the public mind, the silence and the inaction of public opinion.

Plain and staring is the presence in our midst of this ruttish and bawdy disease of

THE TOLERANCE OF EVIL 63

Impurity: obviously and beyond dispute this age is ridden by the obsession of sex to an extraordinary degree: frankly and without justification commerce and art trade publicly on this moral decadence; — and nothing of a great, national, and re- ligious character is even attempted in counteraction. This is the peril. This is the indictment. Man's pure and beautiful Ideal of Womanhood is dragged down into the middens of prostitution, the Queen of Earth is strumpeted for a pastime, Motherhood is without sanctity and with- out reverence, the whole world turns itself for amusement to the dishonoring and the degrading of Woman; and public opinion is unmoved. There is not even a cry of pain.

Our condition is the condition of the Ro- mans described by St. Paul. We are de- livered over to '' the sway of infamous passions '' to *^ the promptings of a mind abandoned to itself,'^ we pervert the natu- ral function, we are '^ set ablaze with lust-

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ful passions/' we are abandoned ^^ to the

perpetration of hideous sins/'

'' So the God whom they had bestial- ized abandoned them, sunk as they were in the lusts of their own hearts, to the thraldom of impurity, till they bestial- ized themselves with one another,"

It is the hour of the Beast.

A CRISIS BETWEEN GOOD AND

EVIL

HITHERTO in the modern history of mankind evil has never had a

majority on the council of public opinion. The long heredity of religion has exercised in the souls of men, however tolerant or base they may have been, an influence tending towards respect for vir- tue. Thus it has come to pass that rever- sions to barbarism have been rare among nations, and that the story of the human race, after the foreword of Christianity, is, for the most part, a tale of progress in re- spectability.

But there are signs that this quiescence and passivity on the part of evil are com- ing to an end. Political individualism, and

** 65

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even religious individualism, seem to be working themselves out, but moral indi- vidualism is thrusting itself into a vigorous existence. Men and women publicly jus- tify conduct which has incurred the censure of mankind for thousands of years, the most brilliant and admired of our modern writers preach the gospel that every man should do what he wants to do, that re- sistance to natural impulse is nothing more than timidity: the spirit of the age is a spirit of liberty without restraint, egoism without conscience, life without God.

It is not difficult to prophesy the end of this development. If each man is to be a law unto himself in the moral sphere, if individualism is to consult the lusts of its own flesh and not the universal voice of historical conscience, if human life is to be organized by the State without refer- ence of any kind to God, then for a cer- tainty civilization will perish. I do not mean that it will perish in an orgie of sen-

CRISIS BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL 67

sualism, or that the most contagious of diseases will eat it out of existence, or that there will be any violence of revolution, any political cataclysm, any dramatic and pictorial event comparable with the French Revolution. I mean that the civil- ized nations will perish at the heart, that their populations will fall as a stone falls to the earth, that their manhood will be feeble and ineffectual, that their woman- hood will be artificial, that their life will be without purpose and without drive.

And no man who is honest and unpreju- diced will dispute that animalism has a just right to preach its gospel and organ- ize the life of the nation to suit its real and living principle, if we abandon faith in God. Nor can it be doubted that the pres- ent organization of society frustrates ani- malism and is inimical to evil. Therefore the salvation of humanity lies absolutely in God. Rescind the divine hypothesis, set democracy to think only of physical well- being, educate that democracy to believe in

68 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

the naturalness of lust and the right, nay the duty, of every individual to extract from animal existence as much animal pleasure as he can comfortably assimi- late,— do this, and in a generation you will have halved the population, you will have wrecked flesh and blood, you will have struck a deathblow at family life, you will have destroyed the vital instinct for tran- scendence.

Newman was right when he prophesied the stern encounter of two real and liv- ing principles, contending for distinctive moral characters, — ^^ one in the Church and the other out of it." It must be, it can only be a conflict for the soul of the world between those who believe in Christ and those who deny Him.

How is the Church prepared? Those who have read Medicevalism, a book which exceeds in passionate and righteous in- dignation, as it easily exceeds in intellec- tual power and spiritual purity, even Stevenson's great scornful chastisement

CRISIS BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL 69

of the traducer of Damien — those who have read Medicevalism know that it is not so much an answer to Cardinal Mercier, not even a destruction of a particular Papal encyclical, not even a magnificent justification of Modernism, but that it is rather the most solemn and terrible indict- ment ever brought against the Catholic Church. Who can forget the cry from Tyrrell's soul as he contemplates the his- tory of Christ's Church and sees centuries — whole centuries — given up absolutely to the madness of political ascendency, whole centuries spent in cunning treachery and diplomacy to compass the temporal tri- umph of the Vatican bureaucracy? Who can forget the lamentation of his soul as he contemplates this waste of perverted power and compares it with the hunger and thirst, the wickedness and the sickness of a world seeking shepherdless for God? The Church, he says, is commissioned to teach what Christ taught, in the way that He taught it, and not otherwise: and

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the Church is commissioned to be what He was, the revelation of a new life, the in- spiration of a new hope, the communica- tion of a new strength.

All the world had been Christian by this time, he cries, had the Church been faithful to her divine commission.

Is she any nearer to the realization that her divine commission — so manifestly, so unmistakably, and so exquisitely written in her earliest documents — is to *^ teach and propagate a new life, a new love, a new hope, a new spirit ''?

With other evil signs of the times, such as the falling birth-rate, the spread of a hideous disease, and the decay of family life, must be numbered the clerical com- plaint of empty churches. Is the cause of this evil, the cause of all other evils ? — is it due to the Church's apostasy? " This,'' says Coleridge, '' was the first and true apostasy — when in Council and Synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems." Is it because

CRISIS BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL 71

democracy has lost faith in religious 5m- cerity? Is any church empty where Chris- tianity is declared to be *^ the revelation of a new life, the inspiration of a new hope, the communication of a new strength? " Would any man be dead to religion who saw, visible and manifest in the whole Church of Christ, the propagation of a new life and a new love, a new hope and a new spirit?

Let it be as clear to you as the gather- ing strength of iniquity that no political expedient, no social adjustment, and no law of our land, however scientific and cour- ageous, can avert the stern encounter of good and evil, or assure victory for right- eousness. It will be, and it must be, a con- flict between those in the Church and those out of it, a conflict between Christ and Antichrist. The Church may summon to her aid the man of science and the poli- tician, but it is she herself who must lead the van and get the victory. Nor must she stand on the defensive, taking council with

n THE CRISIS OF MORALS

science and politics as to how she may most safely entrench herself against at- tack, she must rush upon the enemy, mak- ing her onslaught in the faith of a living God and in the power of a present Christ. It is Christ who is attacked under all the creeping guises of iniquity, it is the moral character of Christianity that is threatened by the real and living principle of evil; it is the foundation of goodness that is being sapped by the hidden forces of Satanism. For the Church to stand on guard, for re- ligion to lean upon science and politics, is to put heart into the enemy: defeat and ruin must ensue. A Church on the de- fensive is a Church without faith, and a Church without faith is a house built upon sand.

There is no power which can save hu- manity outside of religion: and the living religion of Christ not only can save hu- manity from this peril and from that, but can bring the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Does the Church apprehend what it means

CRISIS BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL 73^

to bear the commission of Christ and to make herself in the world ^^ the revelation of a new life, the inspiration of a new hope, the commnnication of a new strength ' ' ?

iVI

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH

IF I were to venture in this place to com- mend a policy to the Church whereby she might draw into her ranks all those multitudes of men and women who love virtue, but who cannot accept certain theo- logical interpretations of revelation which the Church cherishes as essential to re- ligion, I should be led so far away from my subject, which is a subject of action rather than of speculation, that this monograph would end in labyrinthine complexity.

Nevertheless, if it be only in parentheses, I would emphasize the claim of what is called Modernism to be heard at this hour by all those who are set in authority over the Church. I would beg the Church as it exists outside of the Vatican to consider

74

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH 75

the extreme urgency of drawing to her side without further parley every man and every woman who acknowledges in Christ a conjunction of Divinity and Humanity. The stern encounter must of necessity be, as Newman says, a conflict between those in the Church and those out of it ; and the rigid test which may be excused in time of peace is an inexcusable madness of in- tolerance in time of war.

And now I would implore those who be- lieve that the trumpets are sounding for battle to force the enemy into such a posi- tion as shall make the first onslaught turn upon Purity. In other words I desire to see the Church lifting up in the midst of this age and in the face of an enemy al- ready in arms, the flag that bears the lilies of the Lord. And it is not because this is the ground of greatest advantage to the Church that I long for the first shot to be fired and the first charge to be made in the name of Purity, but because Impurity is the head of Antichrist. Impurity is a

76 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

menace to civilization and to religion in- finitely bolder and infinitely more destruc- tive than infidelity; it is the most conta- gious disease of the soul; it is the spirit of the age ; and it is already so insolent in power and so boastful in its logic that unless it be immediately attacked it will defy destruction.

What must be the first action of the Church?

As we have already affirmed, the great and sovran means to this end is the exalta- tion of Woman. To exalt Woman, as we have said, man's attitude towards women must be changed, and to change this atti- tude man must be taught to entertain the idea that Purity is a natural condition of the soul, Impurity the corruption and per- versity of a natural instinct.

But this is animal Purity.

I do not think that a man who truly knows the world will assert that any ani- mal virtue is safe without the consecration of religion ; and certainly no animal virtue

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH 77

is less safe without the consecration of re- ligion than Purity. If Purity is left to the ethicists, democracy will fashion itself a new ethics puzzling to the older moralists. Nor do I mean by democracy the ignorant and brutal masses of mankind; I mean the godless and half-educated multitudes who shout for individual liberty in the moral sphere on intellectual grounds discoverable in the works of such teachers as Mr. Ber- nard Shaw. These people will soon prove that the higher animals are only pure for want of self-consciousness, that the evolu- tion of the human race is towards variety and choice, that there is no more reason why a man in the twentieth century should be as pure as the Golden Eagle than that he should abandon his tooth-brush and trousers because such inventions of hu- man ingenuity are not to be found among the anthropoid apes. Already such an animal virtue as valor is condemned by certain ethicists as irrational ; martyrs are exhibited by the cynics of the age as so

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many fools who threw away their lives for a quibble. Therefore, Purity, wliich calls for all the strength of the soul, is not safe without the consecration of religion. Moreover, since Christ insisted upon this virtue with the most daring, the most piercing, the most profound, and the most illuminating of all His aphorisms, — Every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her al- ready in his heart, — we may be very sure that Purity is of central and infinite im- portance to humanity.

Animal purity, or natural purity, is re- spect for woman as mother of mankind; it is simply racial instinct; it is exposed to manifold perversions. But in Christ, Who is the revelation of a new life, the inspira- tion of a new hope, the communication of a new strength, this animal or natural purity becomes a supernatural, a spiritual, a divine purity. The moralist teaches us that adultery is wrong, and bids us fight against temptation. Christ unhesitatingly

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH 79

declares that the man who has lust in his heart is even as the man who has fallen victim to his lust. The purity of Christ is not a purity of conduct, it is a purity of inwardness. It is not the outside of the body that must be cleansed ; it is the centre of the life. And revealing to humanity this non-human necessity of the new life, He inspires us with a new hope, communi- cates to us a new strength sufficient even for this attainment.

The new hope is immortality, and knowl- edge of immortality upon earth. '' Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'' The new strength is Christ Him- self, Who comes to the heart of man and can only then enter, when man, conscious of his insufficient strength, calls to Him. '' Behold, I stand at the door and knock,'' Tagore has seized the beauty of this pausing Christ standing at the door of the human heart waiting to be called within. God does not come to us as King, tyrannous and conquering. He comes as Guest. He

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does not take possession of us and make us His slaves; He waits to be invited to our hearts. God is not seeking a servant in humanity, but a host. The mystery of the Incarnation is the guesthood of God.*

It is, then, of utter importance that re- ligion should make war upon Impurity, since it is only through Christ that the heart of humanity can be cleansed and that natural purity can be strengthened with spiritual power. We might hope to overcome impurity in its baser forms by science, education, and laws; but without Christ we cannot transform the pure and natural race instinct into a passion of the spirit. Without Christ, our purity can

* " When Augustine prayed, ' Give me chastity, but not yet,' he really wanted to be pure, and he also really wanted to indulge a little longer; and it was the same he who wanted both. To say to such a man that he must strengthen his will is mockery; his will is just himself, and how shall a man strengthen himself except by coming deliberately, when the good desire is uppermost, under some external influence? And how shall that good desire ever be uppermost, except through the indwelling Spirit or communicated grace of God?" — William Temple in Foundations, Chap. V, pp. 23G-7.

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH 81

only resemble the decorous and orderly respectability of a model village or a gar- den city; it can never redeem us from all iniquity, it can never transfuse us with the poetry of immortality. Without Christ even a virtuous family life may be dull and provincial, without the true Christ it may be narrow, harsh, and unattractive. Christ is the supreme Necessity of the human race.

And when the militant Church comes to perceive this, and to perceive it and appre- hend it so that she cannot help but act upon the conviction, she will find that the insistence of Christ on the purity of in- wardness is as greatly a teaching of social reform as of the religious life. She will come to see that our efforts at political reformation have failed because we have not first laid their foundations in the heart of man. She will come to know that sci- ence, education, culture, ethics, and legis- lation have failed to bring Millennium and failed to discover Utopia, because the only

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thousand years of joy is the eternal Now of consciousness, the only Utopia is the heart of man. But when she has made the discovery, when she realizes that the heart of man must be cleansed, that women must be exalted, and that purity must be made the foundation of character, how shall she proceed in her crusade against the enemy of truth and beauty and joy?

It is easy enough to say that the Church must take arms against Impurity, to lose oneself in a military metaphor until every trumpet is sounding, every drum beating, every standard shining in the sun, and only arms and plan of campaign are wanting; but what in very truth must the Church do, what course of action must she pursue, what is the definite and different and new action she must take in this crisis of morals?

If I say at the beginning that she must first believe in Christ, shall I be rebuked for insolence or mocked for an escape into indefinite elusiveness?

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH 83

But I do not mean by this saying that the Church must believe in dogmas con- cerning Christ or that she must increase her energy in theological speculation. I mean that at the beginning of her action she must verily believe in the continuing presence with humanity of a Guest Christ, a Guest Christ waiting to help and only able to help when our wills consent and our hearts open to receive Him; and I mean that she must also verily believe in the necessity of this Christ, so believe in His necessity to humanity that she is not merely sceptical of political reform or doubtful as to this and that expedient of social reformers, but that she judges every effort of reform by the revelation of Christ and flings the whole weight of her power to spiritualize with His spirit every one of these reforms which is not contrary to His revelation.

Has the Church yet manifested such a faith in Christ?

Ask yourself what part the Church has

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played in the many courageous and com- passionate movements towards Brother- hood?

Ask yourself what part the Church is playing now to cleanse our national life of the intolerable shame of sweating? Ask yourself what part the Church is play- ing now to sweep out of existence those rookeries and slums which science and ex- perience teach us are responsible for so much disease, so much misery, and so much awful iniquity — even that growing and most awful of all infernal iniquities, the iniquity of incest? *

I do not say that these reforms are easy to effect, or that they can be done swiftly and violently; but I ask whether the

* In a Dublin police-court the other day a man was asked to state the number of people who lived in the single room which constituted his home. He replied, " My wife, myself, six children of mine, my brother Pat, and one child of his who is dying of consumption. There are ten of us in the room." The man's wife said that the ages of her children ranged from thirteen years to twelve months. " One of them was sick now, and Pat's child might die at any moment, as its lungs were bleeding." — See Public Opinion, October 10, 1913.

A CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH 85

Clmrcli as a Church is doing any single thing to bring them about!

Is it not true that the Church never or- ganizes herself for political action except when her own temporal advantages are in jeopardy? And does this not point to the implication that the Church neither be- lieves in Christ nor considers Him essen- tial to human welfare! — does it not vindi- cate the conviction of democracy that the Church is only the policeman of her own property and the pedagogue of her own conventions 1

Faith in the continuing presence of Christ, faith in the necessity of Christ, — this vital, living, and convincing faith would make the Church a spirit of sovran power, would quicken religion into the chief, the only ferment of our national existence.

All the Churches of Protestantism are guilty in this respect, and no one Church can cast stones at another. To democracy the Church of Christ, not merely the

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Churches of Christendom, is under sus- picion, and it is under suspicion because it is so inexplicably, so indefensibly sepa- rated from the labor of the social con- science.

Were it not wise for the Church, before she takes arms against Impurity, to con- sider the futility of theological disputation, the unprofitableness of ecclesiastical con- troversies, and to fulfil herself with the one perfect, sufficient, and eternal Affirmation of Christianity which is Christ Himself?

* * Of all the attacks of so many thinkers upon each other,'' said M. Bergson in his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Eesearch, ^^ what remains? — nothing, or very little. What counts and endures is the positive truth we have de- clared: the real affirmation substitutes itself for the false idea, and is found to be, though one has not taken the trouble to contradict anybody, the best of contradic- tions.''

vn

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

WITH this positive faith in Christ, the immediate course of the Church is straight and de- cisive. She must attack Impurity and organize her forces to attack it.

How should she attack it?

She must attack it publicly, politically, nationally. She must attack it as it was attacked locally many years ago in the town of Chatham, England, a great naval and military depot, yet not in the spirit of a mission or a revival, not spasmod- ically, and not as an angry aside of her dignified life. It must be a calm, lasting, and most earnest concentration of her energies, with nothing suppressed or morbid in the methods employed, — with

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politics and science on either side of her advancing host, but with Christ's revela- tion of a new life, Christ's inspiration of a new hope, Christ's communication of a new strength as her flaming and uncon- querable centre. With the recognition that Impurity is the chief disease of the age, the Church, as the physician of hu- manity, must organize all her forces not for its suppression, but for its extirpa- tion.

This town may serve as our microcosm. It was probably no worse than, if as bad as, many another town of the same size. But a man went there who perceived that its immorality was shocking and horrible, a man who could not bear to see this shameless immorality without taking ac- tion; and because of this man, who be- lieved in the power of Christ, and who was determined to strike for religion against such public corruption, this to^vn was cleansed. What this one man did for a single town the Church can do, and can

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 89

do lastingly, for the whole country, and the whole world.

The man who thus attacked Impurity in Chatham was a minister of the Gospel. He did not content himself with denouncing vice in the pulpit, but went out into the streets and led a public crusade against it. He persuaded a local newspaper to let him expose the horrors of the town and brought into existence a public opinion. In spite of the choleric denials which always greet such an exposure, in spite of the indigna- tion worked up against him as a vilifier of the town's good name, he continued this fearless, pitiless, and deadly indictment. Then, when public opinion was sharply aroused, he went to the Salvation Army, made arrangements with it for the recep- tion of every fallen woman willing to be redeemed, and afterwards sent his emis- saries into the streets. These emissaries explained to the fallen women that if they wished to recover their decency and self- respect, a door stood open before them, a

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hand was already stretched out to receive them; and they were warned at the same time that if they remained one day longer on the streets of the town they would be arrested. In one single day two hundred of these women were prosecuted and sent to prison. Such was the state of public indignation that the naval and military authorities were forced to take action. Numbers of bad houses were placed '^ out of bounds.'^ The whole town changed its attitude towards vice. A new spirit was born into the life of the community.

Thus, by the energy and courage of one man this town, if only for a time, was cleansed of much iniquity.

Now consider what would be the effect if the Church undertook with the same earnestness and the same fearlessness a crusade against the manifold impurities of the age. Suppose that the newspapers were persuaded to assist in the national cleansing, and that the nation was apprised day after day of all those things which

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 91

pollute the air and poison the blood, — told of the incredible spread of contagious dis- ease, told of the number of fallen women, — an immense army — told of the machina- tions of procurer and pimp, told, too, of the economical conditions which lead to the ruin of so much virtue. And suppose that those members of our National Gov- ernment who are Christians forced this question of national Impurity before the attention of the House, joining their forces to compel legislative action. And suppose that every parish in the land was organ- ized to fight this campaign in its own terri- tory, fighting it in the streets as well as in Church and public hall. And suppose that all the fallen women in the land were given the same choice given to the fallen women of the town referred to — the choice between rescue and prosecution. Is it not certain that in such a campaign as this. Purity would emerge triumphant and Christianity come at last to its own as the sovran influence of national life?

9^ THE CRISIS OF MORALS

But the Cliurcli would have to do even more than this to set Purity on the throne of power. All this is comparatively easy of accomplishment, is, indeed, a reform so long overdue that men have come to regard the scandal of our streets as a necessary evil. It only needs a stirring up of pub- lic opinion to make men realize, for in- stance, that there is no more reason in the world why thousands of bad women should take possession of the central streets of the metropolis at night than that one bad woman should be allowed to walk the street of a respectable village. I happen to know that the police of our metropolis resent very bitterly the indignity and disgust of controlling the nightly carnival of vice, and that they only want one word from a courageous authority to clear the streets absolutely of this frightful effrontery.

But this, as I think, is a first step easy and inevitable. I cannot think that a Church really in earnest would encounter serious difficulty in such obvious and de-

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 93

cent reform. One thinks, indeed, that a single newspaper might settle the public scandal of harlotry in a campaign of six months. But Purity will never be estab- lished on the ruins of vice.

How shall we labor to build up Purity on religious foundations, how strive to make Purity a virtue of our national char- acter?

Now, every man who has studied this question knows very well that the expla- nations usually offered for dreadful vice are insufficient. To take but one instance; it is commonly stated that immorality in a certain school is due to overfeeding, over- feeding particularly in the matter of ani- mal food. And vice in general is attributed more to this single cause than to anything else. We over-eat, we over-stimulate our bodies, and the animal grows stronger than the soul. But this plausible explanation is as little true in fact as the more absurd delusion that an aesthetic temperament is the cause of sexual madness. One dis-

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covers that vice exists in orphanages where boys are fed with a scrupulous attention to health, and where meat is certainly cut down to a most attenuated minimum. One finds, too, that uncouth and barbarous operatives in a small manufacturiag town can be as vicious as the most refined and elegant sybarites of our larger cities. One finds, too, that men employed in so laborious and healthy an occupation as sea- faring are as liable to perversions as the sensuous flaneurs and the posing philan- derers of the most artificial circles in so- ciety. No, there is little hope for humanity if we seek our remedies in diet and exer- cise. There is no hope at all of a cure if we limit our diagnosis to the body.

There is but one universal cause of vice, and it lies in the will of man — it is the will itself. Not all the physical culture, not all the dieting in the world, can change the will of a man ; nor do I think that any man can himself radically change his will. It is only the communication of a new

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 95

strength that can enable men to follow the revelation of a new life in the inspiration of a new hope. A new strength, a strength from outside of us, a supernatu- ral strength, the mystical communicated strength that flows into the soul of man from a union of his will with God's— this it is alone which can cleanse the heart and fortify the soul in virtue.

It depresses one almost to a state of hopelessness to fkid men and women who are fighting Impurity in the name of re- ligion obsessed by the political spirit. Re- hgion brings these organizations into ex- istence, but religion loses them almost as soon as they are organized. They become political. They contract the bad habit of lobbying. They deliberate with politicians and doctors. They publish medical pam- phlets. They issue interesting reports on housing and the birth-rate. They become as orthodox as the Bible Society, as im- posing and as little apostolic as a Church Congress.

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How can men and women of intelligence persuade themselves that reform in hous- ing is a cure for vice when the most vicious people of the community are housed in decency and comfort? How can they lay such tremendous emphasis on education when obvious as the sun at mid-day is the depravity of the educated classes? How can they work themselves into a scientific enthusiasm on the subject of diet, when vice of every kind is found amongst the poorest classes?

I suppose there are no people so chaste as the peasants of Ireland, and they are still housed in many districts worse than animals. I doubt if any class in the com- munity is more gross in immorality than seamen, whose bodies are strong and whose diet is measured to the limit of necessity. And where can one find greater insolence towards purity than among those sections of society who boast of their re- finement and who are certainly better edu- cated than the middle and lower classes?

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 97

All these false ideas about environment, physical conditions, and mental culture are as foolish as the solemn nonsense talked by Eichard Burton about a '' Sotadic Zone.'' Vice in every phase is found in every quar- ter of the world and among all sorts and conditions of men. Virtue knows nothing of geography, is indifferent to climate, and triumphs over heredity and environment. No man who has travelled with observa- tion, and who has read with intelligence, can doubt that vice and virtue are to be found everywhere under the sun.

I would not have the reader think me so foolish as to see no importance in housing, education, and diet. In my anxiety to tear men away from the delusion that these things are matters of the first urgency, I fear that I expose myself to the censure of a hasty and careless critic. And therefore, I would interpolate at this place an em- phatic statement that I desire with all my heart, on moral as well as upon physical grounds, to see mankind better housed, bet-

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ter educated, and wiser in their dieting. Not only is man's physical health im- proved by sanitary dwellings, an employed brain, and natural food, but his will can exert its force easier and get a greater reaction from a body brought into a con- dition of physical fitness by these means. The body of a man is like an engine, the will is the driver of that engine, and an engine to be efficient must be treated with every care and every caution.

Nevertheless, it is obvious, surely it is staringly obvious, that the first of all con- siderations is the will. A skilled driver would get more out of a fifth-rate engine than a man ignorant of engineering would get out of the finest engine in the world. Mischa Elmann, given a child's fiddle, could make better music than a ploughman could get from the most perfect of violins. The power of man resides in his will, and to over-emphasize the importance of his physical apparatus is to make religion the handmaid of politics.

A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 99

It should surely be the first, if not the only employment of religion, to insist upon this immense premiership of man's will. Science can be trusted, and politics can now be trusted, to work for social ameliora- tion ; it is not as if politics and science were without the humanitarian impulse of a democratic spirit, not as if religion had to do with political parties or with the as- trologer and the alchemist; science and politics are definitely inspired with the spirit of social progress ; they may be en- couraged and hastened by the religious conscience, but they do not need to be con- verted; indeed one might say that both science and politics are working more faithfully for brotherhood than organized religion.

But religion is not insisting as it ought to insist upon the will of man as the very centre of human life. To insist upon this truth of history and experience, is to save the only form of individualism which can survive the experiments of democracy.

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The bodies of men can be regimented for the State, and the possessions of men can be treasuried for the commonwealth, but the souls of men cannot be massed, cannot be driven, cannot be changed by legislation or altered by a shibboleth of political faith. They are separate. They are free. They are invisible and unarrestable. And it is in their souls, not in their bodies, that men are either happy or sad, righteous or evil. Not all the poverty and deprivations of the social abyss could darken the soul of St. Francis, nor all the beauty and luxury, all the splendor and dignities of sovereignty purify the evil heart of Pope Sixtus IV.

The will of man is the sphere of religion, and in this stern encounter with impurity it is to the wills of men that religion must address her warning and her invitation.

yiii

THE CREATIVE FORCE OF A NEW

IDEA

EVERY one either knows or believes in I *^ the expulsive power of a new af- fection." There is another power of equal force not yet so generally recog- nized, and this is the creative force of a new idea.

We learn from medical science and from psychical inqiry that suggestion plays an enormous part in the human mind. The most powerful form of suggestion— made by a medical man during a state of hyp- nosis in the patient— will cure the very worst disease of the soul, even the most rooted of moral perversions.

But there are other forms of suggestion which operate with considerable power in

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a perfectly natural manner and upon mul- titudes of men at the same time. There is distinct suggestion, for instance, of music hall, of tavern, of street, of mountain, of valley, and of sea. It is not so easy for the best of men to feel conscious of religion in certain places, nor so easy in other places for a sensualist to believe in his sensualism. An actor might conceivably play Hamlet in a cathedral, but it would be difficult for a clown to sing a comic song in the National Gallery or the Congressional Library.

I believe that the immorality of the age proceeds very largely from suggestion, and that the horrible forms of impurity which threaten social life may be traced to the creative power of a new idea. This new idea is only new in the sense that it is a recurrence to the human mind of an idea hitherto suppressed and certainly held to be shameful by the majority, an idea which has sprung into new life ever since the propagation fifty years ago of the Darwin-

CREATIVE FORCE OF A NEW IDEA 103

ian thesis. This idea consists in the con- viction that men and women are animals, that animal passions are not only natural and necessary, but superior to moral laws, that God is at most an indefinite hypothe- sis, that immortality is the absurd super- stition of barbarous ages, that life is with- out purpose and without aim.

Such an idea is a revolution.

Do we quite realize that this idea is spreading with extraordinary rapidity among the multitudes, — spreading with the greater rapidity because by them it is never formulated! We who read and we who think know that the Darwinian thesis is challengeable, and that properly formu- lated as Darwin himself formulated it, there is nothing in this thesis which does not add to the glory and dignity of the universe. But humanity is not composed of those who read and think, and even among those who do read and think there are those who believe the Darwinian idea to be the death of Christianity— no Fall of

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Man, and therefore no Atonement. These men and women, if they are writers and speakers, take delight in spreading their convictions among the multitudes; a so- ciety exists for the propaganda of '' ra- tionalism'^; democracy, where it takes a serious interest in life, is learning in cheap pamphlets, in sensational magazines and books, and in public meetings to be- lieve that religion is false, that God is un- knowable, that man is an animal. And this idea, definite and formulated for a few thousands of people, is spreading like a contagion among millions who neither rea- son nor desire reason, whose unoccupied minds are only receptive to catch uncon- sciously the common notions of the mass, without apprehension it is true, but with a vague sub-conscious consequence.

No passage in the brilliant address of M. Bergson already quoted was more sig- nificant than that in which he spoke about the phenomena of telepathy.

* ^ If telepathy is a real^ fact, it is a fact

CREATIVE FORCE OF A NEW IDEA 105

which can be indefinitely repeated. I go further: if telepathy is a real fact, it is quite possible that it is always at work and in every one, but with such slight intensity that it is unnoticed, or in the presence of obstacles which neutralize the effect at the very moment when it is about to manifest itself."

One believes that there is no obstacle to neutralize this effect when the brain is spongy, torpid, and dense with unemploy- ment, and that however slight the inten- sity of the common thought may be it does produce an effect, it does exert a positive influence on the minds of the multitude. Thus it is that the work of a few thinkers in any given period spreads so marvel- lously that historians can speak of *^ the spirit of the age.'* Thus it is that we find the most ignorant and stupid millions of mankind acting in the spirit of ideas which they have never consciously apprehended and never even indefinitely formulated to themselves, acting, living their lives, in the

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spirit of ideas formulated by the tens, ap- prehended by the hundreds, and perceived even only by the thousands.

This telepathy, this form of suggestion, is infinitely more powerful on the lower planes of intellect. A sudden loosening of moral restraints among a few people, a sudden fashion of light conduct, a sudden spirit of frivolity or animalism, spreads with a most extraordinary intensity throughout the whole social organism. A man like William Poel encounters almost insurmountable obstacles in suggesting that the theatre is not a booth or a shop, rather a temple of art consecrated to truth, taste, and beauty; but the person who in- troduces a new form of sensual dancing finds his suggestions acted upon with surprising enthusiasm from Moscow to Venice, and from Venice to London, and from London to San Francisco almost be- fore he has established a reputation as in- novator.

We must perceive, then, that a powerful

CREATIVE FORCE OF A NEW IDEA 107

force of telepathy is always in operation, proceeding from the vigorous minds of the commonplace materialists, who are deter- mined to regard life only as an adventure in animalism. This telepathy exists in every street and house, in every shop- window, in every book and magazine, in every word, even in every face. Men and women by their inmost thoughts and by the manner of their lives exert an influence, create an atmosphere, set in motion an engine which drives the world.

Consider this wonderful passage, so un- true to coarse minds, so certainly true to every one conscious of spiritual influence — this wonderful and beautiful passage in Dostoievsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov:

"• Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spite- ful with ugly words, with wrathful heart ;

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you may not have noticed the child but he has seen you, and your image, un- seemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenceless heart. You don't know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, acting, benevolent love.''

If the face of an angry and hating man may throw a dark shadow on the defence- less heart of a child, what influence is cast upon the equally defenceless heart of youth by the universal sensualism of a gross and sinful age manifesting itself in the im- modesty of pictures, the indecencies of feminine garments, the lubricities of thea- tre and music-hall, the wanton, insolent, and unashamed luxury of shop-windows, the flippancies of conversation, and the un- challenged possession of public streets by vice in its most shocking and incredible degradations ?

CREATIVE FORCE OF A NEW IDEA 109

From such telepathy as this, exerted by millions of minds all over the world, pro- ceeds the horrible illusion that Impurity is natural, that purity is the impossible ideal of religious fanatics. From this tremen- dously potent telepathy has come the hideous cynicism, the abominable blas- phemy, perhaps the most traitorous of all mankind's treacheries— the calumny that woman is temperamentally vicious. And it is to me a most marvellous thing, almost the greatest tribute to Woman's beauty, that in spite of this long and strength- gathering telepathy, women have not ac- cepted the temperament thus attempted to be forced upon them by the evil thought of sensual ages. In some respects it would appear that the Feminist Movement is an effort on the part of Woman's soul to throw off this hypnotic iniauence of man's sexual autocracy, a superb effort on the purer creature's part to vindicate her chas- tity and her moral grandeur. Now religion can only war with telepathy

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by a stronger telepathy. Legislation wliich does not touch this telepathy of a sensual age, changes nothing. Men, to be changed, must be changed in their wills.

Christ gave to the soul a new thought, a new suggestion, a new telepathy. Into the horrors of a world frightfully ex- hausted by debauchery and individualism He breathed the revelation of a new life, the inspiration of a new hope, the com- munication of a new strength. He changed the thoughts of men, He changed their ideas. He changed their souls. He set Himself to amend no law, to alter no custom, to effect no revolution in social conditions. He laid His healing hands upon the souls of men and opened their spiritual eyes to something of which they had never dreamed — a new life,

Eeligion, if it be the religion of this victorious Christ, must be still the revela- tion of a new life, the inspiration of a new hope, the communication of a new strength. If it is not neiv it is nothing.

CREATIVE FORCE OF A NEW IDEA 111

It must still come to the world as the saviour of souls, the giver of strength and the restorer of life, not as the social re- former and the diffident servant of science. Social reform and the discoveries of sci- ence may be used by religion, religion must indeed Christianize every effort of man's mind and every aspiration of his soul that is Godward ; but the centre of her activity must be ever that spiritual point from which there can radiate the hallowing power of Christ 's continuing presence with humanity.

At this dangerous juncture when it does indeed seem that the hour of the stern encounter is approaching, religion must make haste to seize her rightful position- occupying it with all the force and power of an absolute conviction. She must pro- claim and in a voice undoubting and en- thusiastic with faith that Christ is in very truth the revelation of a new life, a life utterly different from the world's; the in- spiration of a new hope, a hope of very

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truth more glorious than the world's; the communication of a new strength, a strength infinitely more powerful than the world's. In a word she must meet the active suggestions of evil with the active suggestions of good.

IX

THE TELEPATHY OF PURITY

A GAINST the telepathy of animalism, A\ the Church must set the telepathy of Purity. Let her make trial of the creative force of a new idea. Let her sug- gest by all the powers at her disposal that Purity is natural, that Impurity is a per- version.

This is the new idea which may not only rid the age of the sex obsession, but which may stir the human mind from stagnation and drive it into fresh channels. For it must be recognized that the undoubted preoccupation of this period with sexual interests is considerably due to the dul- ness and uneventfulness of modern life. Men were coarser but more healthy in their animalism when life was crowded with danger; so long as the field of adventure

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was open to them, so long as they lived in the presence of action, so long as they had healthful occupations of mind and body, they were not ridden by a single thought, they were not victims of one fixed idea. But now, when for vast multitudes of men living in unnatural conditions, labor is only a dull and mechanical means of earning a fixed wage, when life is so mapped and policed that even youth can hope for no adventure and expect no excitement, what is there left for men who are not con- scious of Christianity's new life save this tarnished, soiled, and morbid perversion of racial instinct, this bending over the dead bones of romance?

In the heart of every man is either an altar or a sepulchre. He must be either lifting up his thoughts into the light of thanksgiving, or bending them, depressing them, bowing them into the darkness of his own spiritual death. He must be either mounting up into life, or sinking down into corruption.

THE TELEPATHY OF PURITY 115

With nothing to reverence, nothing to long for, nothing to possess and occupy his soul, man tends inevitably to prey upon the arrested instincts of the past, pervert- ing what w^s once rightful, natural, and healthy, into what is now wrongful, un- natural, and deadly to health. In this way civilization has tended more and more to force the thought of men into sensualism. The day's work of dull toil is only pos- sible because of the evening's freedom, the evening's freedom only anticipated with pleasure because it holds the promise of adventure ; and the only promise of ad- venture now lies in the region of sexual romance. The streets of cities are crowded every night of the week with pathetic mul- titudes seeking escape from ennui in ad- ventures of sex. The taverns are packed with thousands who seek to drink them- selves into other Ihood; the music-halls and moving picture palaces are thronged with thousands who hope to lose their troublesome Ihood in illusion; but the

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streets are thick with millions who are seeking to find an escape from this same Ihood in the diversion of romance — ro- mance which is sordid or vnlgar, horrible or iniquitous.

Moreover life is now so bounded and standardized that not only the wage- earners are conscious of ennui; the leisured classes are also bored out of pa- tience by the even dulness of existence. The scandals of society are caused by men and women seeking an escape from torpor. The perilous pleasures of the rich are at- tempts to create excitement. Men now go to dinner parties, to dances, and to coun- try houses seeking adventure and ro- mance. They may escape sensual sins in the excitement of card-playing, in the occupations of shooting, hunting, fish- ing, motoring, and golf; but the easi- est diversion, the most exciting adven- ture, lies in the modern perversion of romance.

Never before in the history of the world,

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I think, was so pregnant an opportunity offered to evil. Humanity is tired, hu- manity is not interested in life, humanity is discontented and disillusioned. How dull is mechanical life, how exhausting the mean struggle for existence, how monoto- nous even the luxuries and pleasures of wealth. A mind is presented to evil, the collective mind of over-civilized humanity, which has no strength to resist suggestion, and which has only just power enough to receive ideas. Into this mind. Evil is send- ing the suggestions of animalism. A telepathy is in operation fatal to spiritual life. Humanity, exhausted by its tremen- dous forward pressure into physical tri- umphs, is beginning to go backward morally. It has worked too hard. It de- mands to be amused.

Even the amusements which pass for in- tellectual are smirched with moral deca- dence, as witness the following paragraph from a leading article in a respectable newspaper : —

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" The old question of the narrow line which separates the amusing from the serious has been raised once more in connection with two of the plays pro- duced this week. In Mr. Shaw's ^ An- drocles and the Lion/ which an appre- ciative critic calls ^ the most amusing of his religious plays,' comic capital is sought in the moral, intellectual, and physical distresses of the martyrs of the Early Church. In Sir J. M. Barrie's ' The Adored One ' the basis of two acts (and part of a third) of elaborate fooling is a murder.''

Is it not plain from such plays that hu- manity is tired and exhausted and bored with its long heredity! Is it not also plain that from such plays a telepathy pro- ceeds which is harmful and bad, a telepathy which is in fact part and parcel of the de- structive telepathy of baser and more hon- est iniquity?

To counteract this suggestion of evil,

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religion must exert her own suggestion; she must break through the cynicism and bitterness of humanity, she must plough up the infinite torpor of that exhausted mind, and she must plant there the seed of a new idea — the idea that Purity is natu- ral, that Impurity is unnatural.

The creative force of a new idea is more than man can measure. Let us trust this rectifying thought concerning Purity and see what it will do for the next generation. Let us teach children not so much to fight against Impurity, and not so much to strive after Purity, but to regard Purity as natu- ral and to regard Impurity as unnatural. Let them, I mean, face towards life with the conviction in their minds that goodness is the law of their being, that the set of their souls is towards virtue, that their strife is not to struggle from vice into vir- tue, but to advance from virtue into holi- ness. Let them, above all things, be cer- tainly taught w^hen they are of an age to understand, that an impure woman is the

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most lonely and the most awful rebel in nature, that there is nothing outside hu- manity so terribly and so infinitely de- graded as a creature living on the perver- sion of the purest and most beautiful of all natural instincts. Let this idea be fos- tered in the mind of youth. Let it be made manifest and incontestable to the youth of both sexes that the commonest and most terrible of all vices is in very truth the perversion of that holy passion which mankind instinctively adores, the passion of motherhood.

I believe that it has not yet occurred to one man in ten thousand that harlotry is unknown in nature. The set of men's thoughts for ages has been towards toler- ance of this awful perversion, so that in spite of all the hard words and contempt they may use in their dealings with public women, in their hearts they regard this moral degradation of the nobler sex as nat- ural and inevitable. One may find among quite virtuous and religious people an

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extraordinary tolerance in this matter, a sorrowful resignation to a deplorable state" of things, but a pained conviction that thus it has always been and thus it must con- tinue to be. And from this tolerance, this terrible acceptance of the fallen woman, come all other forms of vice. While that tragic figure walks the streets of great cities, the sacrament of marriage will be blasphemed. So long as the fallen woman is accepted, Womanhood can never be ex- alted. And until women are pure men will not be godlike.

a

The Harlot's cry from street to street. Shall be old England's winding sheet.''

It is to be earnestly and devoutly hoped that the modern movement of women to- wards liberty, so soon as it has perceived how little can be accomplished by legisla- tion, will concentrate the whole of its moral energies upon this scarlet shame of womanhood. If women are to win their

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liberty, if they are to claim a moral and intellectual and political equality with man, they must cleanse the minds of men from the loathsome obsession that by their na- ture women are vicious ; this they can best begin to do by a complete and total restora- tion of the fallen woman. Salvation lies for women, and by the same token for hu- manity, in the exaltation of Womanhood. It is impossible while thousands of women live in a degradation unknown in nature that men should feel that holy reverence for women which is their strongest human safeguard against impurity and baseness. Where women are honored, the Divinities are complacent : where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God,

THE HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHER- HOOD

A LL that has been beautifully said about A\ Woman and about Home remains: but how much has been said on these heads, particularly in the last century, which rings false, which cloys with senti- mentalism, which inspires the cynic and parodist with harmful mockery?

The human mind refuses to be cloyed. Sentimentalism has never nourished those mysterious powers. Romanticism wears out; it only irritates and infuriates the mind's sense of the values of reality. Much of this period's rebellion against do- mestic life may have its spring in reaction from mere sentimentalism.

There is really little to hold the atten-

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tion and quicken tlie admiration of men in the managing housewife and the doting mother of the last generation. Women do not attain their highest when they are excellent housekeepers and considerate mothers. One can scarcely imagine any- thing more insufferable to adventurous youth than to be imprisoned in one of those respectable country homes of the provinces where every drape is straight on its chair, where the tea bell rings to the minute, where the greatest possible disaster is the failure of the kitchen range, and where the good habits of the parents are proclaimed as the final consummation of creative evolu- tion.

Such households, such homes, and such m.others, have too often earned the praises of religion; they have too often been ex- hibited by religion to the irritated atten- tion of youth as the supreme blessings of human life. Religion, most lamentably, is thus associated in the popular mind with all those qualities in modern character

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which are so disastrous to the imaginative life, associated, too, with a type of mother- hood which can never exalt the soul of mankind, with a type of home which can never satisfy the heart of man.

And yet it is just such mothers, just such homes as these which present to religion one of its great opportuni- ties to insist upon Christ as the revela- tion of a new life, the inspiration of a new hope, the communication of a new strength.

These mothers are merely moral, these homes are merely respectable. They be- long to the old life of paganism, not to the new hfe of Christianity. They exhibit none of the persuasive qualities of the new revelation; they scarcely differ in a single respect from the good homes of the world before Christ ; about such mothers and such homes one can be sentimental, never en- thusiastic.

Now since it is of the very highest im- portance that religion should restore the

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home-life of civilized nations, and should, to accomplish this end, create fresh rever- ence for motherhood, it is essential that she should be entirely free from the old false sentimentalism and insist with ardor upon the real qualities of motherhood and the real nature of home. It is an age of rebellion and a time of transition. The Church must face this difficult hour with reality in her soul. She must not offer to mankind in revolt the stale comforts of a past age nor the false ideals which have already soured the souls of humanity.

Instead, then, of a faint-hearted attempt to restore the old conventional idea of home-life, the Church should see whether she cannot offer to mankind a new concep- tion of this human centre, whether she can- not bring into existence a truer and more persuasive notion of family life. So long as she considers that Christianity has defi- nitely established itself in humanity, and so long as she regards the civilized nations as successful examples of Christianity in

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action, so long, of course, will she cling to the vanished ideals of the human race, those ideals which have vanished because they were false, because they did not truly represent the new hope and the new life, and clinging to these ideals she will lose humanity. But when she perceives and apprehends that Christianity is not yet established in the human heart, that the civilized nations do not commend Chris- tianity to the peoples who follow other re- ligions, do not exemplify but rather distort, deform, and mutilate the Christian idea, then the Church may take heart of grace to create new ideals for the human race out of her discovery that Christ is the revelation of a new life and the inspira- tion of a new hope.

^^ Our worship," says William Temple, *^ is something laid over the surface of our lives, not something bursting from their inmost depths. We go to church in fami- lies and sit in our own pews; we say our own prayers, and pay our respects to our

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own God ; and then we come out again and go to our own homes, to get our own luncheons or our own suppers. We do not concern ourselves with the people in the next pew, unless they sing out of tune, when we brace ourselves for the extreme measure of turning round to look at them. How can we hope to realize our fellow- ship with the whole company of believers in the Communion of Saints when this is our attitude to those who worship at our side? We know some little fragment of the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God ; of the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost we know virtually nothing.'* {Foundations. Chap, vii, p. 358.)

It would seem that men are on the verge of this great discovery, that Fellowship is the soul of the Christian idea. We are members one of another, we form a brotherhood, and we are sons of one Fa- ther. Instead of individualism, fellowship; instead of selfishness, disinterested kind- ness; instead of force, love to the utter-

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most. When we see this aspect of Chris- tianity we realize that it is indeed the revelation of a new life. And yet is it not the aspect of Christianity which is more palpable and manifest than any other? Is it perhaps because theologians have warred so fiercely in the disputable field of dogma that the Church has for so long contentedly lived her new life in the old world, con- forming to the old world ^s pagan customs, believing that the new life revealed by Christ is concerned only with the specula- tions of Divinity?

But Christ is the revelation of a new life. The life He brings to humanity is an actual existence, and an actual existence entirely different from the existence of those who live without the inspiration of His new hope and without the communica- tion of His new strength. Christ reveals to men the life of the spirit. He sets this spiritual life over the natural life. He says that to gain the whole world and to lose the soul is not profitable. Immortality ex-

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plains everything. It is the new hope— an immortality of love, a persistence of the soul after death in the ecstasies of love. God is a Father. God so loved the world that He gave to humanity this revelation of Himself — this revelation of love. To enter into the kingdom of our Father we must exercise love one toward another. God's Fatherhood can only incarnate itself in Man's Brotherhood. The fellowship of the Holy Ghost is the Church of Christ.

When this revelation comes home to the soul of a man he sees at once, as it were in a flash of light, that human existence as it is now organized, whether virtuous or depraved, does not express the Christ idea. The inequalities of wealth, the in- equalities of housing, the inequalities of nourishment, the inequalities of raiment, the inequalities of joy, leisure, and happi- ness— these things alone compel him to see that the Christ idea is not yet realized by humanity. The central teaching, the brotherhood of man, a brotherhood founded

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upon love, living for immortality, and marching mtli joy and expectation towards God, is not obeyed, is not even appre- hended. For thousands of followers of the Way, this wonderful new life of Christ is represented by attendance at church and subscriptions to charities. Brotherhood is rhetoric.

If we have so completely failed to realize' the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, is it not certain that all our ideals, merely from this one failure to understand the centre of Christianity, must partake of error? At least, it is not certain that the conven- tional characters of this partial Christian- ity will not represent the real Christian types?

Consider in this light the conventional character of the Christian mother. She de- votes herself to her home-life; she is a faithful wife, an affectionate parent; she sets the comfort of her husband and the well-being of her children before any con- siderations of her own happiness; she is

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industrious, she is loving, she is hospitable, she is given to good works.

Now in what manner does this woman differ from the good women of other na- tions who are not Christian! In what respect is she superior to the Roman ma- tron, or better than the Greek mother who worshipped the gods and schooled her children in virtue! Are we truly sensible in her of such an immense difference as one rightfully expects to find in a woman to whom has been revealed a new life, to whom has come a new hope, and in whom exists a new strength! On the contrary, do we not see in her merely the average good woman to be found all over the world and at all periods in the history of mankind! Is she not simply the natural pure woman, the natural kind mother, the natural true wife! And if such virtue is really all that is required of us, surely the Incarnation of God is impossible to under- stand; surely the forces of evolution, with Plato, with Seneca, with Marcus Aurelius,

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even with Guicciardini and Mr. Lecky to help ns, might have brought the human species as far as this.

It is obvious that such good women do not exemplify the motherhood of new life. The homes which they have blest do not typify the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, without which can be no Brotherhood of Man. Some other ideal must be discov- ered, some truer inspiration found for humanity.

But where is it that these good mothers have failed? Why is it that in the last analysis they are no different from the good mothers of a pagan world?

The centre of their failure is the centre of the Churches failure — the inability or refusal to realize the truth of human brotherhood. These good women have loved their children for their own sake and for the world's sake; they have labored to make them successful and prosperous ; they have striven and denied themselves that their children might make a fine appear-

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ance ; tliey have hoped that they might get on in the world ; they have prayed that the good name of the family might never suf- fer; they have used morality and religion as conventions of society to aid the ma- terial prosperity of their children. Not once has it occurred to them that Christ is the revelation of a new life, a life quite different from the life of a particular so- cial circle, or the life of an ugly, struggling, soul-crushing commercialism. They have accepted the world, they have accepted the life of the world, they really have no strength except the world's strength. They are subservient, most of them, to the rich and the powerful; they are observant of conventions which neither touch char- acter nor stimulate the soul; virtuous and religious themselves, they mix with a world not virtuous and not religious, without seeking to change the soul of that world, caring about it, interested in it, and only anxious not to give offence. The world knows that the religious people who asso-

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ciate with it are interested in its ways and impressed by its spirit. The plutocrat de- clares that every man has his price. So- ciety is flattered by the curiosity of the religious and says that religion is a matter of temperament. The good mothers dis- approve of certain things, but they ac- cept society's life. Religion has trans- formed nothing for them. Life is what it is, and they can make nothing more of it.

Now, if from the first they had believed that Christ is the revelation of a new life and had perceived that the world's life is a false life and a bad life, and further- more if they had realized that this world's life is only what it is for a moment of time, that it is for ever in the act of growth, for ever changing its clothes and its thoughts, that far from being unalterable it is the most inconstant alterable thing on earth, then might they have felt the inspiration and the strength to make something of their motherhood which would have served

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humanity and hastened the Kingdom of God.

For, then, instead of considering the worldly futures of their children and the good repute of the family name, and in- stead of making religion ^* something laid over the surface of our lives, not something bursting from the inmost depths, '' these good mothers would have been inspired with enthusiasm for humanity, would have striven to make their children heroes of God. And this is the supreme difference between the good mother and the mother to whom Christ is in very deed the revela- tion of a new life. Not that her children may succeed in the world, but rather that they may help those who do not succeed: not that her children may be prosperous and renowned but that they may so live as to be a rebuke to worldly prosperity and worldly renown : not that her family name may be untarnished but that the name of humanity may lose its reproach: not that her children should keep the laws and ob-

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serve the conventions of the respectable world, but that they should keep only the two great laws of Christ — love towards God and love towards Man: not that her children should strive, struggle, and wrestle with the world, but that they should stand apart in the simplicities and radiating peace of wills that rest in God, — this is the passion and these are the ideals of the woman whose motherhood is con- secrated, beautified, and rendered divine by the Spirit of Christ.

Such a mother as this, to whom life is really a new thing, will not accept, cannot possibly accept, the compromise which vir- tue makes with the world. She must of necessity live a new life, a life which tran- scends the life of the world. She will not be deluded and deceived by the appear- ances of respectability. She will not, for example, send her children to school with the idea that they shall pass certain ex- aminations, enter particular professions, and thus assure themselves of comfortable

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incomes. She will labor, on tlie other hand, to destroy in the souls of her children those movements of our barbarous past which we describe as " praiseworthy am- bitions/' Her scheme of education will be to deepen and intensify spiritual life. From infancy her children will be sur- rounded by simple and beautiful things; she will be as careful to keep away from them luxurious and ugly things as to de- fend them from infection or evil; she will develop their faculty of observation; en- courage the habit of reflection ; direct their interest and wonderment into the region of worship, adoration, and love ; her own life of self-sacrifice, of compassion, of humility, and of tenderness will shine into the souls of her children with the beauty and attrac- tion of Christ. She will have one object and only one — to make her children serv- ants of the Brotherhood.

Through such mothers as these and, as I think, only through such mothers as these, can humanity hope to realize the

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Brotherhood of Man. There must be this Motherhood before there can be that Brotherhood. Nor need the Church shrink from exalting such a type of Motherhood in the fear that the ideal is beyond the reach of humanity; the other type is worn out and discarded; it was false, it was pagan, it was without passion and without beauty. The only other alternative is the sexless mother of society.

Let the Church acknowledge that Christ is the revelation of a new life, and she will not fear to exalt the higher type of Motherhood. Let her see, too, that this higher type of Motherhood can alone bring about the Brotherhood of Man, indeed can alone save our civilizations from extinc- tion, and she will find the inspiration as well as the courage for her mission. Fur- thermore, let her realize that this Mother- hood which seems too difficult and high for humanity is in truth the easiest, the sim- plest, the most complete and the most satis- fying of all forms of Motherhood, and then

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she may wake out of her nightmare and proclaim Christ with a living faith as the revelation of a new life, the inspiration of a new hope, and the communication of a new strength.

XI EELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE

MEN in earnest about life are turning more and more away from religion and are looking with even greater expectation towards science. It is in sci- ence they find the revelation of a new life, not in religion; it is to science, not to re- ligion, they make their appeal for ^ ^ a new Keformation."

Let me quote a significant passage which occurred recently in a leading article of a London newspaper. This newspaper recognizes the crisis of the present age, and invites the ordinary man to interest himself in science for the promise science holds of happiness and nobler life: —

*' He would find a new meaning in the care of his body, home, and habits; he

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would appreciate the trust that he holds for the common cause in the right di- rection of his personal life; and he would not forget the part he has to play in safeguarding the springs of heredity and in laying his own stones well and truly in the building of the future generations. The moral health of a people requires that conduct shall be touched everywhere by imagination. Science has within itself the spark which can kindle the routine of daily existence to a new significance and link it with the furthest dreams. It is for men of sci- ence to bethink themselves how they can spread their New Learning to be the agent of a new Reformation.''

Is not this appeal a rebuke to the Christ? ** The moral health of a people requires that conduct shall be touched everywhere by imagination.'' Seeley saw this, too, and said *' no heart is pure that is not pas- sionate; no virtue is safe that is not en-

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tlmsiastic "; but he added '* such an enthusiastic virtue Christ was to intro- duce." To-day the publicist says, *^ Sci- ence has within itself the spark which can kindle the routine of daily existence to a new significance and link it with the furthest dreams.'' Eeligion is not men- tioned even in a parenthesis.

But I have quoted this passage not so much to rebuke and awaken the Church as to suggest that in the matter of home-life religion must seek a definite alliance with science. If we are to rid ourselves of the sentimentalism referred to in the last chap- ter, and if we are to seek a new ideal of home, a new ideal of family life, it is to science we must go for the new Learning which is to be the agent of a new Keforma- tion. For it is true that a man conscious of the definite teaching of science finds *' a new meaning in the care of his body, home, and habits ''; he is not living on the sen- timentalism of his fathers, but rationally and vividly in the light of indisputable

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knowledge. He is interested in his body as an engineer is interested in his engine; he is as interested in his home as a carpenter is interested in the building of his own house, he is interested in his habits as a general is interested in the fitness and efficiency of the troops under his command. To such a man life is not a blundering, staggering, and blindfold alternation be- tween surrender to temperament and re- spect for social laws ; it is a steady, beguil- ing, and dignified advance in moral evolu- tion.

Nevertheless without *^ the sacred pas- sion of the second life,^' without the beauty and the glory of religion, how dull, how prosaic, how trivial and self-conscious be- comes the life of such a man! The father of Tristram Shandy will never warm the blood of humanity, nor is Professor Hux- ley, with all his fine qualities, a hero who uplifts the soul.

With religion science is the hope of the future ; without science religion will never

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recover the present generation's respect, interest, and optimism.

It is agreed on all hands that the most pressing social need is a reconstruction of family life. The greatest danger to civili- zation lies in the disruption of the home and the decay of the family. Men of sci- ence, politicians, and ministers of the Church are of one mind on this matter. Let us inquire then at the end of our mono- graph, what may be done by this human trinity, by science, politics, and religion, to bring about the most urgent and the most essential reformation of our times.

We have suggested that the Church / should recover its earliest enthusiasm, \ and with a living faith in Christ as ) the revelation of a new life, should insist upon Purity as the rock of character — purity not only of conduct, but of the in- ward life. We have advanced the convic- tion that until Woman is restored to her natural dignity all our painful and heroic struggles for political betterment will

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prove abortive. We have urged the Church to preach a new Gospel of the sexes from nature's text that Purity is natural, Im- purity is perversion. We have suggested that the Church should institute a national crusade in the name of Christ and for the sake of humanity, and should seek the assistance of the politician and the man of science in such legislation as shall prevent the machinations of immorality.

These tilings, we earnestly believe, are first things and must come first. But pressing close on their heels must come the reformation of home-life which is to give humanity a new Motherhood. In conclu- sion, then, let us see what can be brought to religion by science and politics in the great concernment of creating for civiliza- tion a new and nobler family life.

Already a step has been taken in the right direction by Ireland, where the Rural Community is becoming every day a more settled part of the national existence. America has already sent to Ireland a

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Commission of Agricultural Enquiry which was addressed by Mr. George Eus- sell on the subject of the Rural Community. Denmark, Germany, and Italy are moving in the same direction — the direction of co- operation, brotherhood, fellowship. We must build up throughout the land as soon as may be these Rural Communities — ** The eternal task of building up a civiliza- tion in nature, the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed ' ' ; — we must plant out in our fields these brotherhoods, these communities of toiling men, these fellowships of laboring humanity; and we must see to it that such communities, if they get their implements from science, and find their title deeds in politics, should seek their inspiration in religion.

But when all this is accomplished, what shall be done with the home in the town, with family life in the city! It is neces- sary, says Mr. Russell, for the creation of citizens, for the building up of a noble national life, that the social order should

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be reorganized, that the sense of inter- dependence should be constantly felt; and he adds: ^' It is also necessary for the preservation of the physical health and beauty of our race, that more of our people shall live in the country and fewer in the cities/'

He proceeds :

* * I believe it would be an excellent thing for humanity if its civilization could be based on rural industry and not on urban industry. More and more men and women in our modern civilization drift out of na- ture, out of sweet air, health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generation there is a rickety population, mean in stature, feverish and depraved in character, with the image of the Devil in mind and matter more than the image of Deity. Those who go, like it at first, but city life is like the roll spoken of by the prophet which was sweet in the mouth but bitter in the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new life, but in the

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third generation the cord is cut which connected them with Nature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up sundered from the source of life. Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who will, as •Moses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage, excite the imagination and lead humanity back to nature, to sun- light, starlight, earth breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and health! Is it impos- sible now to move humanity by great ideals, as Mahomet fired his dark hosts to forgetfulness of life, or as Peter the Her- mit awakened Europe to a frenzy so that it hurried its hot chivalry across a Conti- nent to the Holy Land! Is not the earth Mother of us all! Are not our spirits clothed round with the substance of earth! Is it not from Nature we draw life! Do we not perish without sunlight and fresh air! Let us have no breath of air and in five minutes life is extinct. Yet in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day.

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^^ The lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and may look into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not the return of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea to inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green trees and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there is no intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when man is surrounded by mystery and miracle ! When the mys- terious forces which bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered, when earth is teem- ing with life, and the dumb bro^vTi lips of the ridges are breathing mystery. Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hid- den in the earth as provocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is not thought on these things more interest- ing than the sophistries of the newspapers'? It is only in nature and by thought on the problems of Nature that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the

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Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world. ' '

Unquestionably the ideal for humanity is the breaking up of great cities, and the building of commercial centres in the midst of the dignity and beauty and restplaces of nature. But cities will remain ; masses of mankind will always live an artificial existence; the problem of family life in the towns will persist. What must we do to dignify and consecrate that life of the home?

One of the great aids which religion can seek from science applies equally to town and country. It is the aidance of archi- tecture. The houses of a past generation witness to an absolute contempt of Fel- lowship. Our fathers not only saw no scandal in building the houses of the poor in frightful contrast to the houses of the rich, but even in the palaces, mansions, and villas of the rich thrust without shame the servants that waited upon them into dark unhealthy cellars and miserable attics.

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Moreover, these houses, the rich man's and the poor man's, were built without any serious reference to the labor of domestic life, and, further, they were built before science had revolutionized the toils and the hardships of the housewife with a dozen appliances for making life pleasant and agreeable. It is now possible to build houses which are beautiful, convenient, and easy to manage. Electricity has become the universal servant to humanity; under the control of municipalities it can be ab- solutely made to revolutionize the life of the poor, it can be made to light their houses, to cook their meals, to clean and dust their rooms. With scientific planning a town which contains millions of people can yet be healthful and beautiful : London, for instance, so far as the metropoli- tan area is concerned, could be so re- planned and rebuilt as a rural village of cottages like Port Sunlight and yet hold ten more millions of human beings. Our present arrangement, says Sir Wil-

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liam Lever, is simply a case of bad packing.

Eeligion, then, can hopefully demand for the new home-life of Civilization the aid of science and politics. Statesmen must get the land and provide the money ; men of sci- ence must devise with architects the com- mercial city and the convenient house; re- ligion must consecrate this rebuilding to the glory of God and the service of hu- manity.

In every city there should be divisions into communities, and each community should be founded upon the basis of co- operation; and this co-operation should be domestic as well as commercial. There should be kitchens for every square of houses, kitchens, wash-houses, and stores: there should be municipal places of refresh- ment and entertainment, the public bar be- ing wiped out of existence as an intolerable anachronism: there should also be for every square of houses a nursery man- aged by efficient and religiously-inspired

154* THE CRISIS OF MORALS

nurses where mothers might leave their children for an hour, a day, a week. Every- thing should be done to render the duties of Motherhood not merely .light and easy but beautiful and encouraging. The chief pride of each community should be the health, intelligence, and conduct of its chil- dren. Man should find his highest pleasure and his deepest amusement in the King- dom of Childhood. Some of the decay in family life may justly be attributed, I think, to the dreadful ugliness of so many city children, and to the sickness, the pee- vishness, and the everlasting anxiety of children wrongly fed and vilely treated by women ignorant of motherhood.

And the work of religion would not end with this political and scientific reforma- tion. A man can see, and at no very great distance, a political and a scientific per- fection ; where an end can be seen the spirit of adventure flags. What religion can do is to breathe into the tired soul of an ex- hausted civilization the tremendous energy

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 155

of an everlasting progress in spiritual achievement, the hope and confident expec- tation of adventures undreamed of by the prophets, a new universe for mankind.

Professor Forsyth was speaking not long ago on the disappointment of old age ; he referred to the weariness and tedium which overcame men when they retired from active work in the world. ' ^ Does th^ leisure, '^ he asked, '' that they looked for- ward to bring them what they hoped for? In how many cases are they eaten up by ennui? . . . Their old age becomes dull, the dullest part of their life. Why is it? "

He gave the true answer. ^^ They have never cultivated in their business life the higher and more spiritual interests. We are here to pass from the one kind of free- dom to the other kind of freedom, the free- dom in Christ. . . . There is nothing so serious in connection with the manhood and womanhood of the present day as the course of pursuing enjoyment and refus- ing responsibility.''

156 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

But why do men pursue a phantom? Why, in spite of all the pessimisms of philosophy and all the protests of religion, does humanity still seek enjoyment where no enjoyment is to be found, and strive for satisfaction where only disenchantment and bitter mockery await it!

Is it not because the Church has failed to convince mankind that it offers a su- perior happiness?

It is natural for man to seek happiness. It is the work of Sisyphus to forbid pleas- ure and to denounce enjoyment. Man was made for joy as the sparks fly upward. God surrounds him with majesty, with beauty, with pleasure, and with love. The revelation of Christ is the revelation of a new life where true joys are to be found. The Incarnation is God's healing brought to humanity's disease. *' I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." '' My joy no man taketh from you." The whole spirit of Christianity is blessing, the one ob-

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 157

jective of Christ the perfection of Happi- ness.

This is the work of religion, to recover for a disappointed, dejected, and cynical human race the energy of its purest joy. And the path of the Church at this time is along the way of revelation — to reveal to mankind that the life of the spirit is the joyful and the adventurous life, that whereas the life of the flesh and the life of the mind have an end, the life of the spirit is endless. Nor must she insist only on the immortality of the soul, but on the power of the spirit here and now. She must teach that materialism is working it- self out, that science is almost at the end of its exploration in the physical world, that soon the whole force of humanity's unconquerable mind will be directed to the religion of the spirit. And here what high adventures must await us, what discov- eries of force and power never suspected, what light on the darkness of the past, what gateways into the unguessed and

158 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

the invisible! Spiritual evolution, spirit- ual discovery, spiritual adventures, this is the great excitement of the future. Not a ravenous pursuit of fortune and self; but a ravenous pursuit of truth — '' The mind always attentive and always satis- fied/'

Surely men will look back upon us with wonder and pity. Our pompous novels about adulterous wives, our comic plays about martyrdom and murder, our dirty- minded advertisements, our prurient pic- tures and photographs, our violent battles over self-government and the monetary endowments of a church, our newspapers crowded with sensationalism from the police-court, our armies and navies crush- ing democracy to the mud of the gutter, our hideous architecture, our insanitary slums, our soul-killing and brutalizing com- petition— how these things will strike with amazement those who have discovered the spiritual life, whose characters are founded upon inward Purity, and who go to the

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 159

yellow pages of the last century's diction- ary preserved in museums for the explana- tion of such a phrase as a fallen woman.

If men are tired of existence let them know that they have not yet opened the book of Life, that they are still reading the condemnation of ignorance and the judg- ment upon sin in the book of Death.

** Life to be fruitful must be felt as a blessing."

'' BLESSED ABE TEE PUBE IN

HEABT, FOB THEY SHALL SEE GOD/'

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