The crisis of morals;

The Crisis of Moral

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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 —
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versational form, pointed and convincing.

TWICE-BORN MEN

A Clinic of Regeneration. 12mo, cloth. Net $.50.

A footnote in narrative to Prof. Wm. James*
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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.
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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-
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human nature in all its heights and depths, and a
remarkable grasp also of the psychology of con-
version."— Christian Intelligencer.

c

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

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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

7

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

11

1^ THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

U THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

16 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

18 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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.

22 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

*^ 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

23

S4 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

26 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

28 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

30

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

32 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

34? THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

36 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

38 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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.

40 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

43

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.

U THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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.

62 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

64 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

ee THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

70 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

78 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

80 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

82 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

84 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

86 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

87

88 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

90 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

94 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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.

96 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

98 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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.

100 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

101

102 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

104? THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

106 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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 ;

108 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

110 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

112 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

113

114* THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

116 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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,

THE TELEPATHY OF PURITY 117

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 : —

118 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

" 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,

THE TELEPATHY OF PURITY 119

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

UO THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

THE TELEPATHY OF PURITY 121

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

n2 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

123

lU THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 125

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

126 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 127

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

128 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 129

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-

130 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 131

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

1S2 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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,

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 133

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-

134 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 135

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

136 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 137

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

138 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

HIGHER TYPE OF MOTHERHOOD 139

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

140 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

141

14a THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 143

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

144 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 145

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

146 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 147

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

148 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 149

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.

150 THE CRISIS OF MORALS

^^ 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

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 151

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.

15S THE CRISIS OF MORALS

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-

RELIGION ALLIED WITH SCIENCE 153

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/'

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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