The Present And Future Of Religion

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Matter, Life, and Value
Essays in Common Sense Philosophy

Common Sense Ethics

Common Sense Theology

Introduction to Modern Philosophy

Introduction to Modern Political Theory

Mind and Matter

The Future of Life

The Meaning of Life

The Mind and Its Workings

Great Philosophies of the World

After-dinner Philosophy

Samuel Butler

The Bookmark

The Babbitt Warren

Thrasymachus, or the Future of Morals

Diogenes, or the Future of Science

The Highbrows
Priscilla and Charybidis

C. E. M. JO AD

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF
RELIGION

ERNEST BENN LIMI.TED
1930

Made and, Printed. %n Great Britain by
The Camelot JPress l-imited,
London

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION page ^

Part I
The Decline of Religion

Chapter I. THE DRIFT FROM THE CHURCHES II

II. THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE

CHURCH 25

III. THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE 37

IV. THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 57

V. THE RESULTS 75

Part II
The Prospects of Religion

VI. WHATRELIGION IS SUPPOSED TO

BE 93

VII. HOW RELIGION AROSE, AND WHY

IT FLOURISHED 105

VIII. THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 127

IX. OUR DUTY TOWARDS OUR NEIGH-
BOUR 143

X. OUR DUTY TOWARDS GOD 179

XI. THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 209

APPENDIX 223

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is threefold : to give an
account of the state of religion in this country to-day,
to analyse the reasons for its admitted decline, and to
indicate the conditions which must be satisfied if it is
to revive. The subject, it will be agreed, is far from
simple. The complex of beliefs, ways of life, organisa-
tions, and institutions vaguely summed up in the one
word "religion," presents such diverse and even con-
tradictory phenomena that adequately to achieve any
of the three objects which I have set myself would
carry me far beyond the limits of the present book.
The decline of religion belongs, indeed, to the history
of our times, and to treat it with the fullness it de-
serves demands qualities of patience and scholarship
to which the present writer can lay no claim.

The task, in short, is beyond me ; nor have I attemp-
ted it. Apart from the fact that I have not the requisite
qualifications for the compilation of an exhaustive
work, my treatment of the subject is necessarily con-
ditioned by the nature of my interest in it, which is
that neither of a believer nor of a sceptic, but of an
absorbed spectator. I neither welcome nor deplore the
tendencies I have set out to analyse, but I find them
intensely interesting. My standpoint and I hope the
admission will not set the reader against me is, in
short, that of the philosopher, interested in what
people believe and anxious to discern the reasons why
they believe what they do. It follows that my method
of treatment is highly subjective. I have written about
what interests me largely in order to make certain
things clear to myself. Hence, while the first part of
the book is in the nature of an impressionistic sketch,
the second is, in effect, a statement of an individual
philosophy ; and, as the first makes no claim to com-
pleteness, so does the second make none to finality.

But, lest the apparent detachment of the foregoing
remarks should lead the reader to think that I am a

8 Introduction

superior person, who regards religious beliefs as
foibles which it is his business to notice but beneath
his dignity to share, let me hasten to add that the
writing of this book has proceeded from two deeply
held convictions. The first is that the need to believe
is fundamental, and that man's spiritual health suffers
if the need is not satisfied ; the second, that the relig-
ion preached by the Churches does not in fact satisfy
this need to-day, and is likely to satisfy it less in the
future. If, therefore, men are to regain the sense of
spiritual rest and the refreshment of spiritual stimu-
lus, which only sincerely held religious belief can
give, one of two things must happen. Either a new
religion will take the field, which, not challenging the
modern scientific conception of the universe, is fitted
to appeal to the modern educated intelligence, or the
Christian Churches must cease to maintain proposi-
tions which are in flagrant contradiction with known
facts. This is not much to ask ; yet, if the Churches
were to comply, they would need so radically to re-
state most of the doctrines upon which they at present
insist as, in fact, to conceoe the demand for a new
religion.

Where so much is obscure, one thing, at least, is
certain : the interest in religion, an interest which
evinces itself in quarters where it might have been
least expected, has increased and is increasing. There
is a reaction from the indifFerentism of the last few
years, and religion has assumed a place in the fore-
front of public attention. Religion is news ; it is even
best selling news.

Since it was announced some little time ago that this
book was in the press, I have received no less than
ten works upon various aspects of religion from
authors who have desired me to acquaint myself with
their views, and where, as has happened in one or two
instances, extracts from the book have appeared in the
form of articles in the Press, they have evoked more
correspondence than any articles I have written. In

Introduction 9

general, the spate of books on religious subjects con-
tinues unchecked, and theology still ranks next to
fiction as the most popular subject with authors.
Thus there is a marked disparity between the decline
of organised religion and the growth of popular inter-
est. There is a twilight of the old gods ; yet, in spite of
the popular demand, no new ones come to take their
places. It is the desire to resolve this apparent contra-
diction that has been mainly responsible for the
writing of this book.

Short extracts from this book have appeared in
the form of articles in Harper's Magazine, the New
Leader, the Evening Standard, the Star Review and
the Rationalist Annual, and my thanks are due to the
Editors of these publications for permission to reprint
them.

C. E. M. JOAD.
Hampstead, 1929.

Part I : The Decline of Religion

Chapter I
THE DRIFT FROM THE CHURCHES

Chapter I
THE DRIFT FROM THE CHURCHES

Traditional formulae have withered in the mental environment
created by modem knowledge and been replaced by a wistful
agnosticism. 1

An annual return is prepared showing the number of
those attending Sunday schools in the Protestant
Churches of England and Wales. In 1927 it showed
a drop of 122,762 scholars as compared with 1926.
In 1906 the Anglican and Free Churches could
claim 6,455,719 scholars ; in 1928 the number had
shrunk to 4,748,872, a loss of over one and a half
million ; while in that year alone the Anglican Church
lost 19,977 scholars, and the Wesley an Methodists
11,765.

In 1927 the Chairman of the Congregational Union of
England and Wales produced figures showing that 25
per cent, of the six million public elementary school-
children in England and Wales received no religious
instruction outside their day-schools. He found,
further, that of 10,000 children attending 50 element-
ary schools, 50 per cent, of the boys and 40 per cent,
of the girls did not even possess Bibles.

Coming to the adults, we find that a comparison be-
tween records of church and chapel attendance in a
typical London area with a population of over 80,000,
at three different periods during the last sixty years,
shows that in 1886-7 the total number of persons at-
tending was 12,996, and the average attendance at 44
services was 295. In 1902-3 the total was 10,370, and
the average at 56 services was 184. In 1927 the total
was only 3,960, and the average at 62 services was 63.
It is interesting to note that, as the numbers of the
congregation have gone down, the number of the
services has gone up.

1 Extract from an open letter addressed by the Bishop of Bir-
mingham to the Archbishop of Canterbury (1928).

14 The Present and Future of Religion

An enquirer who has recently visited 134 churches
at random reports the following facts. At 40 Free
Churches the congregations varied from 200 to 6,
with an average attendance of 40 at the morning ser-
vices ; the attendance at 60 services in Anglican
Churches ranged from 500 to 15, with an average of
55 in the morning and 101 at the evening services ;
five 8 a.m. Communion services had an average of
seven communicants. In a spaciously beautiful City
church the clergyman preached to five men, eleven
women, and five children. The services at St.
Swithin's, Cannon Street, are attended by seven or
eight people ; it is a fine church, and 50,000 has
been offered for it by a business firm.

During 1926 a Bill was promoted in Parliament to
dispose of 19 City churches declared to be redundant.
Speaking for the Bill in the House of Lords, the
Bishop of London said, " There are (in the City) 46
churches, with 60 clergymen, 46 organists and choirs,
ministeringto about 20,000 people at a cost of 50,000
to 60,000 annually. That is a scandal. A dozen
churches would suffice, and 23,000 a year would be
saved." The Bill was passed by the House of Lords,
but thrown out by the Commons. It will be said that
the population has withdrawn from the City and that
the churches have been left in a backwater. This is
true ; but it is not the whole truth. The East End, so
far as I am aware, is still as populous as ever, yet
in one East End district n out of 24 Protestant
Churches have been closed in the last forty years.

It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of
these figures. They mean that a generation has grown
to maturity which our fathers would have regarded as
profoundly irreligious, and that they would find us
getting worse every year. If irreligious means indiffer-
ent to the appeal of organised religion and sceptical
about the Christian cosmogony, we should have to
admit the charge. Whether our indifference to organ-
ised religion means that we have no use for religion,

The Drift from the Churches 15

in the sense that we do not feel the need of faith and
do not suffer from the lack of spiritual experience, is
another matter. Let us, however, see how far our
disbelief carries us.

In October 1926 the Nation published the results of
a questionnaire on the state of religious belief. The
questions asked were searching ; they raised funda-
mental issues. Do you believe in God ? Do you be-
lieve that Christ was divine ? Do you believe that the
Bible is divinely inspired ; that the first chapter of
Genesis contains an historically accurate account of
the creation of the world ; in personal immortality ?
I do not propose to summarise here the answers 1 ;
briefly, however, those who gave affirmative answers
to these questions, the sort of answers, that is to say,
which would be given by persons generally in agree-
ment with the main doctrines of the Christian relig-
ion, numbered between 30 and 35 per cent, of the
whole. The remainder were either agnostics or avowed
atheists. The believers in organised religion as formu-
lated in the tenets of a church numbered only 25 per
cent. The Daily News, which shortly afterwards in-
vited its readers to answer the same questionnaire,
returned a poll of roughly 63 per cent, affirmative
answers. Far more people believed that the Bible is
inspired than that the first chapter of Genesis is his-
torical. The inference seems to be that many people
who regard the Bible as God's book consider that He
has wilfully deceived His readers in the first chapter.
In due course American newspaper readers were con-
fronted with the same questions ; the returns showed
an 80 per cent, majority for orthodox belief.

The inference is obvious : the Nation is read by the
best educated classes in the community by profes-
sors, by University men, by teachers, writers, scien-
tists, and, presumably, by politicians ; the Daily
News by the lower middle classes, not so well edu-

1 They will be found in Appendix I., together with answers to
the Daily News questionnaire.

16 The Present and Future of Religion

cated, valuing respectability and anxious to do and
think the right thing.

The American figures, taken at their face value, are
sufficiently startling. But, on reflection, one is in-
clined to wonder what their face value is worth. Many
Americans who do not believe desire to be thought to
believe, and in a land which is notorious for irreligion
it is more than the position of any public man is worth
to profess doubt. Belief in God, moreover, like belief
in natural purity and prosperity, is sedulously boosted
by the Press, which is quite capable of suppressing
evidence pointing to a state of affairs other than that
which it makes it its business to profess to desire.
Certainly the answers to a questionnaire prepared by
the Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1 indi-
cating the attitude of American students to compul-
sory attendance at religious services, do not suggest
that those who swell the congregations at college
chapels are animated by genuine religious motives.

Here, for example, are some typical answers :

" We do not think of it (i.e. of going to chapel) so much as a wor-
ship period. It is more of a get-together, and is a big influence on
campus life. All announcements are given there. One is afraid he
will miss something if he does not go."

A football coach in a small college for men remarked that
" chapel gets the students up early and started for the day."
" Most of the chapel talks are for raising money."
"It is mere discipline put on to get men out of bed."
" It is held for the sake of keeping men here over week-ends."
" It is a place for roll-call, announcements, and for visitors to
speak."

The answers from women's colleges were in the
same vein :

" All participated heartily in singing and general worship ; the
pastor from a town church preached and made a too evident effort

1 See Chapter III., pp. 45, 46 for figures obtained by this insti-
tute, showing the effects of science upon religious belief among
American students.

The Drift from the Churches 17

to please ; the room was very quiet ; but all through the back girls
read novels, studied, chatted, or whispered. The fact that they
came prepared to while away a boring hour was evident."

In the more responsible American magazines articles
appear drawing attention to the growing irreligion of
the young. Since, it is urged, it is impossible to tell
what the youthful American believes in, it must be
presumed that he believes in nothing, a presumption
which is amply borne out by the account of the man-
ners and morals of young Americans contained in
such a book as Judge Ben Lindsey's The Revolt of
Modern Youth.

It is not scepticism in the matter of religious belief
that these enquiries reveal, so much as a complete in-
difference to the whole subject.

There is no doubt that the general attitude of the majority of the
students in college towards religion is one of indifference rather
than of support or hostility. Everyone is pressed by work and out-
side interests, and many regard religion merely as an added com-
plication to, rather than a simplification of, life. 1

The nineteenth century has been called the age of
belief; the twentieth the age of doubt. That we doubt,
and doubt increasingly, who, in the face of the figures
quoted above, would wish to deny ? Yet it would be
wrong to think of our age as primarily an age of
doubt. For the distinction between doubting and be-
lieving does not go to the heart of the matter. Doubt
at least implies interest. But it is not so much the fact
that we doubt that is important, but that it is no
longer thought to be important whether we doubt or
whether we do not. In the nineteenth century one of
the first things you knew about a man was the nature
and intensity of his belief. For example, we are rarely
introduced to a leading character in nineteenth-
century fiction without being told of the religious

1 Report from a women's university college printed in Learning
and Living, the thirty-fourth annual report (1028) of the Student
Christian Movement.
BR

1 8 The Present and Future of Religion

organisation to which he belonged, and of the assiduity
or otherwise of his church or chapel attendances in
George Eliot's books a man's religious denomination
is almost the most important thing about him and,
if he did not believe at all, or belonged to no religious
organisation, or belonged and did not attend, there is
a great fuss. To-day you can know a man for years
without knowing whether he is a Christian or an
atheist, what Church he attends or whether he at-
tends one at all. The question of belief or doubt, in
short, no longer matters.

Usually he does not attend one at all. What is more,
the younger he is, the more modern in his outlook
and circumstances, the less likely is he to attend. In
the 1929 election, the minister of a Wesleyan Church,
formerly a Liberal, was converted to Labour. With
the enthusiasm of the convert, he was anxious to help
the Labour cause by using his pulpit to stress the
intimate connection between Socialism and the teach-
ing of Christ. To do so, however, was to invite
economic ruin. The congregation of his chapel, upon
whose offerings his stipend depended, were sub-
stantial elderly folk, Liberals to a man, who would
have left the chapel if political opinions contrary to
their own had been expressed. The young of the dis-
trict, to whom the new minister's message would
have appealed, never came near the chapel.

The new suburbs those lines of pink-roofed
villas and bungalows that spread over the countryside
like an irritable rash, as though the land had been
stricken with eczema are almost without churches.
For example, since the war there has sprung up be-
tween Sutton and Merton a new population of 10,000
with religious provision for about 400. Dagenham,
which is already almost as large as Southampton, has
the church and chapel accommodation of a small
town, and even this is not fully used. These archi-
tectural monstrosities are inhabited almost entirely
by young married people, complete with cars,

The Drift from the Churches 19

but without children. The men go to town daily by
the 8.50 and return by the 6.30, while the women
follow their example whenever they can spare the
money for a matinee, which is about twice a week.
They acknowledge no duty towards God, in whom
they do not believe, and no duty towards their neigh-
bours, whom they do not know. Cut off from the life
of the spirit, keeping themselves to themselves, living
in one place and sleeping in another, they pass their
lives in perpetual transit from workshop to dormi-
tory. At the week-ends they take the car along the
main roads and glare suspiciously at other motorists.
They lack the strength of those whose roots are in the
soil ; they are deprived of the social pleasure of those
who live in a community, and they have no souls at all.
A hundred years ago, when one of the new towns of
the industrial revolution sprang up, men's first con-
cern was provision for their religious needs, and, if
they were Free Churchmen, a levy for the chapel was
one of the first charges they felt called upon to meet.
To-day nobody spares the money to build new
chapels, for the same reason that nobody would at-
tend them if they were built. As for the Church of
England, even if there were churches and congrega-
tions to fill them, which there are not, there would not
be enough clergymen to attend to the congregations.
It is difficult, indeed it is impossible, to keep up the
existing numbers of clergy, and the supply of recruits
falls off year by year. In the early years of the twen-
tieth century there were some 21,000 clergymen of
all ranks at work in England. In order to maintain
that number it is estimated that 650 new men must be
ordained every year. In the ten years 1907-16 the
average yearly number ordained was 624 ; in the ten
years 1917-26 it had fallen to 306. As a result, the
present (1928) staff of the Church of England is
just over 16,000, and the number is still diminish-
ing. Some resign in sheer discouragement among
them the Rev. W. O'Connor, Rector of Hedgerley,

20 The Present and Future of Religion

Buckinghamshire, who, in a public announcement
in the winter of 1928, gave reasons for his resignation
which are so pertinent to my present purpose that I
must be excused for briefly quoting him :

There is only one reason for my resignation, and that is the feel-
ing of depression and discouragement which has been growing on
me for the last three or four years.

There is in this parish a number of people who never enter God's
house. There is a large number who enter it very rarely.

What grieves me most is to see so many of the boys and girls fol-
lowing the example of their elders and cutting themselves off from
the means of grace.

The worship of God is a trouble to them, and they seldom or
never darken the door of His house. I have failed to influence
them. I feel as if I were up against a brick wall ; and so I had better
retire.

There are even cases, admittedly not of clergymen,
but of rich and pious philanthropists who bribe
people to attend divine service by gifts of money.

'Three thousand boys attended service at the

Institute last Sunday, and Mr. then announced

that, if the boys brought the number up to 5,000
next Sunday, he would give every boy a ten-shilling
note." 1

On the following Sunday it was estimated that some
5,800 boys appeared. Beginning to queue up outside
the church at eight in the morning, the majority could
not be admitted until four hours later ; there was no
room. Ultimately it was found necessary to hold three
services one after the other, thus enabling all to qual-
ify for the ten shillings.*

Keenly alive to the peril of the situation, the
Churches endeavour to distract attention by waxing
fierce over questions of dogma : whether bread and

1 Taken from the Daily News, 24th January, 1929.

Taken from the Daily News, 28th January, 1929. This episode
provides an interesting commentary on the comparative contem-
porary popularities of God and Mammon. It should, however, be
added that a number of clergymen made a public protest against
this method of filling the churches.

The Drift from the Churches 21

wine are bread and wine or something else, or whether
they both are and are not bread and wine at the same
time ; these are questions which, it seems, are difficult
to answer, but easy to resent. An eminent English
Bishop recently issued a challenge to all and sundry to
distinguish by tasting, touching, smelling, reducing
to their ultimate chemical constituents, or subjecting
to any other test, any difference between a conse-
crated and an unconsecrated wafer. The authorities
of the Church did not take up the challenge ; they did
not even insist upon the difference ; but they said
that the Bishop's remarks were most unfortunate and
had given pain to thousands ! There has been open
dissension in the Church, there has even been brawl-
ing in St. Paul's. In olden times kings who felt in-
secure upon their thrones blew up the flames of
foreign strife in order to distract men's minds from
trouble at home the practice, by the way, has not
been altogether discontinued in our own times. It
almost seems as if the Church would reverse the
process, and embark upon strife within in order to
turn men's thoughts from the apathy without. The
Modernist movement in the Church has provoked a
concerted attempt to light the old fires of the heresy
hunters, but the wood, it seems, is wet ; it will not
catch.

For the decay of religion various causes are as-
signed. There is, first and foremost, the war. Our
generation has seen religion prostituted to the uses of
belligerent nations, and ministers of the gospel of
peace exhorting men to kill other men, whom they
were persuaded by the ministers of the gospel of love
that it was their duty to hate. The problem of pain
and evil has been forced with a new emphasis on
men's attention. It has seemed more difficult to be-
lieve that God was good and that virtue would be
rewarded in heaven ; and, as belief in the next world
decayed, nothing seemed to matter except the su-
preme importance of "having a good time " in this

22 The Present and Future of Religion

one, a phrase which certainly did not denote the en-
joyments of the spirit. Material changes have acceler-
ated the drift from the Churches which the change of
heart had begun. There were Sunday games, there
was a new craving for the open-air, there were motors
to take the family into the country, and the family
itself, that solemn little church-going bloc, was break-
ing up. Finally, there was the spread of science. . . .
All these things have contributed to produce what
is vaguely called the spirit of the age, a spirit sceptical,
disillusioned, irreverent, impatient of authority, and
distrustful of dogma.

And yet, though the Bishops quarrel and the con-
gregations fade away, though the Churches are seen
to stand for little more than a system of traditions
corrupted by time and brooding, and emasculated by
celibate fancies with which the essential humanity of
Christ is overlaid and obscured, though men in in-
creasing numbers refuse to subscribe to orthodox
beliefs, the part which religion has played is not yet
done. There are signs, indeed, that it is taking a new
lease of life. Never have so many books been pub-
lished on religious subjects ; never has the discussion
of the fundamental questions with which religion
deals been more vigorous ; never has there been such
a ferment of spiritual unrest. Noting these signs of
the times, the Press has not been slow to exploit them.
In recent years the papers have devoted an increasing
amount of space to a discussion of religious topics.
Under such titles as "Is there a soul ?" "Where are
the dead ?" or "What I believe !" fundamental relig-
ious issues are eagerly canvassed, and leading novel-
ists are invited to express their views on questions
that have provided the chief themes of theological and
philosophical discussion. Business men give their
views on the qualifications of Christ as an advertiser
of spiritual goods . . . Religion, in short, has become
news.

We should be on our guard against misinterpreting

The Drift from the Churches 23

this awakening of interest as a sign of well-being.
Men do not talk about their health when they are
well, but when they are sick ; we do not attend to our
bodies so long as they function properly. Discussion
is provoked by dissatisfaction, and controversy is
generally a prelude to change. For centuries we have
been wearing a particular suit of morals and subscrib-
ing to a particular set of beliefs. All the time we have
been growing, but the process of growth has been
for the most part too imperceptible to be noticed. In
recent years it has speeded up, and, in the form of a
spiritual discomfort which we can no longer ignore,
has forced itself upon our attention. Wondering why
we are uncomfortable, we find that the moral and
spiritual clothing that we have worn for so long has
begun to irk us ; it is ceasing to fit. And so we have
set about discarding it and looking for a new outfit.

Now the process of discarding beliefs that we have
outgrown, and finding new ones appropriate to our
more developed mental stature, is neither easy nor
pleasant, and it is only when stimulated by gross
spiritual discomfort that we are prepared to under-
take it. The undertaking, moreover, provokes con-
troversy and is attended with friction. It is through
such a phase that religion is passing to-day. There is
controversy within the Church itself, between the
exponents of different forms of Christian doctrine
and the upholders of rival practices, and there is
controversy between those who hold the Christian
doctrine in some form or other and those who, under
the influence of science, look to observation and ex-
periment rather than to revealed religion for truth
about the universe, in short between believers and
agnostics. Both controversies react unfavourably
upon the traditional religion of the established
Churches. Finally, there is the complex of diverse
tendencies denoted by vague expressions such as
" modern unrest" or "the spirit of the age." How
far these are responsible for the decline in traditional

24 The Present and Future of Religion

beliefs, and how far they are themselves the effects of
that decline, it is difficult to say. A personal opinion is
that "modern unrest," with all that the expression
implies, is at once the reflection and the prop of the
religious indifference the causes of which I hope to
analyse. The decline of religious beliefs and the
growth of the modern spirit are two aspects of a
single process, and cocktails and jazz, promiscuity
and suicides, the craze for pleasure and the lust of
speed, are the expressions of tendencies which only
they have made inevitable.

It is because the gospel of Christ is waning that the
gospel of "having a good time" bids fair to supersede
it ; yet the latter is in part responsible for the decline
to which it owes its own strength. In the succeeding
chapters I shall endeavour to give a brief account of
the factors which have been chiefly operative in re-
ducing organised religion to its present pass namely,
the controversy within the Church, the controversy
between religion and science, and the tendencies
loosely grouped together as expressive of the " spirit
of the age."

Chapter II
THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE CHURCH

Chapter II
THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE CHURCH

The second main reason for the present alienation of educated
men and women from the Church of England is the growth of
erroneous sacramental doctrines. 1

For God's sake don't touch the Church of England. It is the only
thing that stands between us and Christianity.*

In the Church of England to-day there are, broadly
speaking, three main parties. There are, first, the
Anglo-Catholics. The Anglo-Catholics deplore, but
are not surprised at, the declining influence of the
Church. It is only, they are inclined to say, what we
should have expected. The message of Christianity
as interpreted by the strictly orthodox Church of
England clergyman is, they affirm, as arid as its
practice is uninspiring. So dry and dull an appeal
cannot hope to compete with the thousand and one
calls upon the modern man's time and interest, and,
unless something can be done to infuse some life into
the Church's creed and some warmth into its prac-
tice, it will within the next fifty years perish of inani-
tion. Hence the Anglo-Catholic aspires to bring back
to the Church some of the colour and movement, to
recover some of the mystical ardours and ascetic dis-
cipline, that she lost at the Reformation. He would
adorn her practices with the rich jewels of a beautiful
ritual, pressing the arts of painting and music into her
service, and decking her priests with the gorgeous
vestments that become the representatives of the
regal majesty of the Divine.
The Anglo-Catholics are mainly to be found among
the younger clergy. They are men of tireless energy
and of unmistakable sincerity, pre-eminent for their

1 Extract from an open letter addressed by the Bishop of Birm-
ingham to the Archbishop of Canterbury (1928).

1 A contemporary wit.

28 The Present and Future of Religion

whole-hearted devotion to their calling and the
simple austerity of their lives. Go to an Anglo-
Catnolic church, preferably in some poor district in
the East End of London, and you will no longer feel
surprise at their influence. The warm colouring and
emotional ardour of Anglo-Catholicism glow like a
flame against the background of squalid streets and
pinched lives. The tapers flickering on the altar, the
slow silences and sudden bursts of sound, the tinkling
bells, the incense smoke caught in the shifting light
of a high-windowed building, the moving figures
clad in robes of flaming colours, the procession,
how can these things not appeal to the dwellers in
narrow courts and foetid slums, whose outlook is
bounded by the sordid cares of poverty and disease,
and whose souls, starved of beauty, welcome any
gleam of colour to break the drab monotony of their
lives ?

Of this elaborate ritual the Eucharist is the culmina-
tion as it is the core of the Anglo-Catholic's faith, and
it is his attitude to the Sacrament of the Eucharist,
which the ordinary Churchman calls the Holy Com-
munion Service, that brings him into conflict with
the orthodox party in the Church, and more parti-
cularly with the Evangelicals. The Evangelical is
shocked at what he cannot help regarding as grossly
improper overtures to the Scarlet Lady of Rome,
He is conscious of the strides that are being made by
the Anglo-Catholics ; he hears of churches where the
Mass is celebrated, where confessions are made, and
where, through the incense-laden air, the rich colours
of an ornate ritual glow and sparkle ; and, horrified at
this betrayal of the Protestant faith of his fathers, he
fears lest all that has been gained since the Reforma-
tion may be jeopardised, if, indeed, it has not been
already lost.

The questions at issue between the two parties have
come to a head in a controversy about the practice of
Reservation, and the controversy about Reservation

The Disintegration of the Church 29

springs in its turn from a divergence of opinion about
the Eucharist itself. The orthodox doctrine of the
Church of England holds that the bread and wine
are by faith only the body and blood of Christ, and the
act of eating the bread and drinking the wine consti-
tutes, therefore, by faith, for the ordinary Churchman,
his participation in the body of Christ. Roman Cath-
olics, as everybody knows, hold that the wafer which
is consecrated in the Mass becomes the body and
blood of Christ, and it was largely upon this issue, the
issue of Transubstantiation, that at the Reformation
the Church of England seceded from the Catholic
Church of Rome.

The Anglo-Catholics do not in so many words sub-
scribe to the doctrine of Transubstantiation, but they
sail very near the wind, and the service which pre-
cedes the consecration of the wafer in Anglo-Catholic
Churches is, in fact, very similar, and in some cases a
literal translation of that in use in Roman Catholic
churches. If, therefore, the process is effective in
working the miracle in a Roman Catholic church,
why should the same process be ineffective in an
Anglo-Catholic one ? That the Anglo-Catholics be-
lieve that it is effective, that the consecrated wafer
does in fact become the body of Christ, is, say the
Evangelicals, shown by their adoption of the practice
of Reservation. Reservation means putting aside some
part of the substance consecrated during the Com-
munion Service a service which in High Churches
is to all intents and purposes the same as the Catholic
Mass enclosing it in a small box called a pyx sus-
pended in the church, usually over the altar, or in a
small cupboard in the chancel, called an aumbry, so
that this consecrated something, whether substance
or symbol, is always present in the church. I use the
word "something" non-committally, but, according
to the Evangelicals, it is no symbol that the Anglo-
Catholics wish to reserve, but the body of Christ it-
self. For why, they ask, should Anglo-Catholic priests

3O The Present and Future of Religion

be averse from disposing of the remains of the conse-
crated wafer, unless they were in fact assured that it
was Christ's body ? Why should they wish to pre-
serve it, to ensure that it may be continually present
in the church, except for the purpose of praying to
it and worshipping it ? And it is precisely this wor-
ship of the Reserved Sacrament in Anglo-Catholic
churches, a worship that to their opponents seems
indistinguishable from the idolatries of Rome, that
is to the Evangelicals the chief cause of offence. And
not only to the Evangelicals, but also to the Modern-
ists.

For there is a third party in the Church, a party
weak perhaps in numbers, but strong in intelligence
and prestige, including as it does most of the men of
first-rate ability in the Church. This is the party of
Bishop Barnes and Dean Inge. It is separated from
the great bulk of Churchmen, and especially from the
Evangelicals, by its open-minded acceptance of the
teachings of science and its willingness to revise, and
even to discard, outworn dogmas in the light of that
teaching ; but it sides with the Evangelicals against
the Anglo-Catholics on the issue of the Reserved
Sacrament. And it does this because, to enlightened
men, the elaborate ritual of the Anglo-Catholic
smacks unpleasantly of the mumbo-jumbo of the
savage. Has not Sir James Frazer shown conclu-
sively in The Golden Bough how primitive peoples
eat their god in order to strengthen themselves,
and is it really credible that the practice of eating
Christ's body and drinking his blood is not a direct
lineal descendant from this old anthropomorphic
ritual ? And what is the doctrine of the Real Presence
but a reversion to the superstitions of the Middle
Ages, an affront to the intelligence of educated men,
calculated to alienate from the Church those who
have any tincture of the modern scientific spirit.
Bishop Barnes has repeatedly referred to the Anglo-
Catholics' "magical or pagan" conception of the

The Disintegration of the Church 31

Sacraments, and protested in the plainest terms
that "mediaeval theories rejected in the bluntest
language at the Reformation are openly taught in
Anglican Churches/'

The English Church to-day (he has said) has only been narrowly
prevented by the State from changes that would end in the primi-
tive superstition that a priest can give spiritual properties to the
inanimate. *

On the positive side Modernism stands for the
humanising of religion, seeking to make it at once
more personal and more topical . There is a growing
insistence upon conduct as opposed to doctrine, con-
duct meaning conduct in this life, which is regarded
as important for its own sake, without reference to
its bearing upon our prospects in the next. Thus
religion, instead of being confined, as it has been in
the past, to a particular set of activities springing
from an isolated and unique side of our nature
vaguely conceived as spiritual, is extended to embrace
every aspect of our personality, and introduced into
all the avocations of daily life. Hence a new emphasis
is laid on the social side of Christianity, and the
Christian point of view is defined in relation to the
business world and to industrial disputes.

The world, in other words, is out of joint. This is a
matter of serious concern, since life in this world is
important in and for itself ; but it is only by the
application of Christianity to life that the evils of the
world can be mitigated. The aspect of a man's relig-
ion, of which it is the business of the Church to take
cognisance, is that which finds expression in the way
he lives. His faith is his private concern, a matter of
personal religious experience, and should not, there-
fore, be confined too closely within the bounds of
any specific creed, or broken on the wheel of obso-
lete dogmas. In brief, the way a man lives is more

1 Bishop Barnes, preaching in the City Temple in the autumn of
1928.

3* The Present and Future of Religion

important than the precise details of what he believes.
Thus far the Modernists !

The antagonism between the various parties came to
a head in the struggle over the Revised Prayer Book.
The Anglo-Catholics have contended that the practice
of Reservation should be explicitly sanctioned, and the
Bishops' proposals, rejected by Parliament, permit the
practice in certain cases without enjoining it. While
it was still doubtful whether the Revised Prayer Book
might not become law, a mass meeting of the younger
clergy among the Evangelicals decided that, if it did,
they would neither follow its services nor obey its
instructions. It has not become law, and the scent of
disestablishment is in the air, while the Bishops are
considering to what length they may go in disregard-
ing the veto of Parliament. At the time of writing
(summer 1929) Convocation has decided to authorise
through administrative action the use of the 1928
Prayer Book, in spite of its decisive rejection by the
House of Commons. 1 Meanwhile the practice of Re-
servation continues, and Anglo-Catholics cheerfully
conduct services which it becomes increasingly diffi-
cult to distinguish from the Mass. And they are pre-
pared openly to resist any attempt to interfere with
them. The Bishop of London, for example, has in his
communications with Anglo-Catholic clergy forbid-
den devotions directly connected with the Reserved
Sacrament. He has refused to allow the Reserved
Sacrament to be moved from its appointed place,
the aumbry or the tabernacle to be opened or censed,
or any reference to be made to the presence of the
Reserved Sacrament in the prayers. At the time of
writing, twenty-one incumbents in the London dio-
cese have decided to contest the Bishop's ruling. "We
wish to make it plain," stated the Rev. C. P. Shaw,
who was chairman of the meeting at which the deci-
sion was taken, "that should we ever come to accept

1 This Resolution was carried in the Upper House by 23 votes to
4 and in the Lower by 96 votes to 54 (nth July, 1929).

The Disintegration of the Church 33

your lordship's interpretation of our oath of canonical
obedience, we should at once lay down our ministry."
Thus there is dissension in the Church itself and
chaotic variations in the practices of individual clergy-
men, and it is difficult to see how the strife of the con-
tending parties is to be composed. At the moment it
seems probable that the Church will split into two
factions.

It ill becomes a layman, perhaps, to comment upon
matters of so technical a character, yet it is difficult
to forbear. To him, as I suspect to the Modernist, the
whole controversy presents itself as an idle wrangle
of little men fussily intent on erecting a molehill into
a mountain. On the one hand, he sees Christ, a heroic
figure, knowing that He is going to die and sitting
down to His last meal with His disciples. And know-
ing it to be His last and feeling a natural sorrow at the
prospect of parting with those who have been with
Him for so long, He looks round for something by
which they may remember Him. And, seeing the
bread and wine, the materials of their simple meal,
He bids them, whenever they eat and drink in the
future to think of Him. He would have them treat
the bread and wine on the table before them as
symbols, souvenirs as we should now say, of this
last meeting and that is all. On the other, he
sees pedants and doctrinaires taking this simple
natural thought and the noble utterance in which
it found expression, letting it fall upon the sterile
soil of their little minds, and raising therefrom
this unholy crop of controversy and superstition
and strife. Maybe he is a Socialist, keenly alive
to the misery and suffering of mankind, persuaded
that the misery and suffering are preventable, and
believing that by a practical application of Christ's
precepts they could be prevented. Maybe a pacifist,
taking Christ's teaching on the subject of non-resist-
ance seriously, and convinced that the only way to rid
the world of war is for others to take it seriously too.

34 The Present and Future of Religion

Christianity, he will say, has failed only because it has
never been tried. No State has yet made the begin-
ning of an attempt to organise society on the assump-
tion that the teaching of Christ is true. For many
men of advanced ideas, to-day, Christ is primarily a
great preacher and teacher of conduct, expounding
doctrines of compelling force and originality. As
such He despises ritual and ceremony, and lays stress
upon what men do. He is a Communist and an inter-
nationalist, advocating the widening of the private
family to include the whole family of mankind. He is
a humanitarian, denouncing punishment, crying for
mercy instead of vengeance, and insisting, if only as a
utilitarian measure, on counteracting evil not with
a contrary evil, but with good. Above all he is a
Socialist insisting on the organic conception of
society, and affirming that we are members of one
another in so intimate a sense that the misery and
degradation of one are the misery and degradation of
all. Very well, then, to take Him seriously involves
disbanding our armies, scrapping our navies, sacking
our judges and lawyers, closing our prisons, and
making arrangements for an equitable distribution of
society's material goods. These things, no doubt, are
difficult, and not to be accomplished in a day. You
cannot inaugurate the Kingdom of God by Act of
Parliament, but you can at least legislate as if you
wanted to ; you can at least try. And because nobody
does try, because nobody ever has tried, we have a
civilisation in which the poverty, misery, and want of
the many are outraged by the arrogance, luxury, and
ostentation of the few, and a society which is not only
based upon arrangements that violate every tenet of
the creed it professes to hold, but prides itself on its
readiness to defend these arrangements if they are
attacked by organising public murder on a scale
hitherto undreamed of.

Civilisation, it is clear, needs the practical applica-
tion of the teaching of Christ as never before. It will

The Disintegration of the Church 35

crash, and deservedly crash, unless it tries Christi-
anity before it is too late. And what are the Churches
doing about it ? Troubled and perplexed by the diffi-
culties of the times, we incline ourselves expectantly
for their counsel and guidance. Our startled ears are
assailed by a confused murmur, as it were the buzz-
ing of angry wasps. We listen more closely, and the
words "aumbries" and "reservation" distinguish
themselves above the general clamour. The Churches,
it seems, are very interested just now in the question
of "aumbries." Or we hear a clerical voice rebuking a
woman for entering a Church " uncovered " that is,
without a hat. St. Paul, it seems, said something about
uncovered women in his first letter to the Corinth-
ians. Or we are regaled with disputes about the
Virgin Birth. The earth, we are given to understand,
was visited some two thousand years ago by a man
whose wisdom was so pre-eminent that it has seemed
to many to partake of the divine. The Church, it is to
be presumed, is the inheritor of that wisdom, or, if
not its inheritor, at least its trustee. Reverently ap-
proaching, we ask that the teaching of this great
visitor to our planet should be interpreted for us in
the light of the needs of our times. And his trus-
tees meet our request with a profound discourse
upon how the distinguished personage travelled to
visit us !

Is it any wonder that men feel a little impatient with
the paid servants of Christ, and regard their wrangles
over Reservation and the Virgin Birth as a clerical
fiddling while Rome burns ? As the newly appointed
Bishop of Chelmsford said, in his inaugural sermon,
"Whilepriest struggles with priest for the mastery, the
world outside looks on with contempt and passes by on
the other side." Some, no doubt, whether from tradi-
tional reasons or from sheer bewilderment in the face
of the complexity of modern life, still look to the
Church for light and leading. They look, but do not
receive. For, where so much is uncertain, one thing

36 The Present and Future of Religion

at least is clear, that a Church rent by the dissensions
and absorbed in the issues at which we have briefly
glanced is in no position to give us what we need.
"Men do really want help," said the Bishop of Salis-
bury, addressing a meeting of the Industrial Fellow-
ship, "and they are not getting help from the Church,
because the Church is divided." And so, though men
still look for what it is the Church's business to give,
they will soon look no longer.

Christianity has been a great adventure of the hu-
man spirit, and Christianity, it seems, in its organised
and traditional form has failed. The consideration
cannot fail to depress. As we read the lives of the
founder of Christianity or of St. Francis, his greatest
disciple, it almost seems, at times, as if the dead-
weight of human apathy and inertia might be over-
come, and the bad old world made afresh. Hope is
born, but only for a moment. Laying down our book,
we remember the clergymen we know, and realise
regretfully that Christ's dream of a regenerated
world is too lovely for the little minds that run the
machine of instituted religion.

Chapter III
THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE

Chapter III
THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE

One cause of weakness of the Church has arisen from the appar-
ent determination of religious teachers to ignore scientific dis-
covery. *

The part which science has played in promoting
religious scepticism in the modern world is consider-
able ; science, indeed, has become a veritable
stumbling-block to religion. Nor is the reason far to
seek. Certain Christian dogmas in which members of
the Church of England are required to believe are
plainly at variance with what science has discovered
about the nature of the universe. The scientific
account of the universe is founded on observation,
and can, in part, be tested by experiment, but the
dogmas which this account contradicts are unsup-
ported by evidence, and are believed, in so far as
they are believed, solely on the authority of the
Church. Hence arises a conflict between science and
faith, a conflict in which the latter is so palpably at a
disadvantage that Samuel Butler's definition of faith
as the power of believing things that we know to be
untrue seems increasingly to be justified. Forced to
make a choice between the authority of the Church
and the conclusions of science, intelligent men have
little hesitation in preferring the latter. Hence arises
a movement within the Church, known as the
Modernist movement, which seeks so to interpret the
dogmas of the Christian religion that they shall cease
to conflict with the facts of science, and educated
men may remain in the Church without having to
leave their intelligences behind them every time they
attend one of its services. This is the movement with
which are associated men like Bishop Barnes and
Dean Inge. Their standpoint implies a whole-hearted

1 Extract from an open letter addressed by the Bishop of Bir-
mingham to the Archbishop of Canterbury (1928).

40 The Present and Future of Religion

acceptance of the conclusions of science. "Modern
science, " said Dr. Barnes, preaching at the City
Temple in the autumn of 1928, "has constructed a
wholly new scheme of the universe and man's place
within it. ... During the present century a wholly
new student class has come into existence. The
achievements and conclusions of modern science are
now accepted everywhere among these new com-
panies of students, not grudgingly, but with enthu-
siasm. . . . How to formulate a faith that shall satisfy
the demands of science is the problem that to-day
confronts the religious teachers of mankind."

" Your sons and daughters," said the Bishop of
Gloucester, in a sermon in defence of Modernism,
" at schools and colleges will be so trained that they
will find it almost impossible to accept the old-
fashioned view of religion. They will respect the
reality of your religion, if it is taught in a way which
does not commit them to uncritical or unscientific
opinions."

The controversy between religion and science is not
a new one ; it has raged more or less continuously
since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in
the middle of the last century. Briefly, what Darwin's
theory of evolution purported to show was that the
development of life upon this planet has been contin-
uous. Once the earth had been too hot and too moist
to maintain life ; it cooled, and the earliest forms of
living organisms began to appear in the form of
specks of protoplasmic jelly floating about in the
intertidal scum upon the shores of the Palaeozoic
sea ; it grew cooler, and life left the water and,
assuming a reptilian form, proliferated in the vast
monsters of the Mesozoic age ; cooler yet, and there
were birds and mammals. From one of these last, a
small lemur-like creature, there were descended two
collateral branches, one that of the anthropoid apes,
the other that of the human race. Man, therefore, was
not a special creation, but merely a late descendant of

The Impact of Science 41

a long line that stretched back to the jellyfish and the
amoeba. Certain links in the chain were missing, but
its main outlines were already sufficiently clear, and
subsequent research has done little more than fill in
the gaps.

This discovery came at first as a great shock. The
doctrine of the Fall had taught men to believe that
they were degenerate angels, and they were dis-
pleased to find that they were merely promoted apes ;
unaccountably, I think, since to have risen from a
lower form of life, however low, seems to be prefer-
able to have fallen from a higher one, however high.
Nevertheless, the blow to man's conceit was very
great. The Church, however, quickly found means to
salve the wound, by representing Darwin's process
as a progress. Not only was man later than the
amoeba, he was also higher ; in fact, being the latest
creature to arrive on the terrestrial scene, he must also
be the last, the perfected product of evolution, a being
made by God in the image of Himself. Whether the
amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known ;
but until we are able to obtain the creature's views
the case must go by default, since we are in the fortu-
nate position of being both judge and jury in our own
cause. It is we who assert progress, and it is about
ourselves that progress is asserted. Have we not
written all the books ?

But even if, as seemed only reasonable, the process
from the amoeba to ourselves were a continuous pro-
gress, how did it bear upon the Christian doctrine of
the creation of the world ? The orthodox view was
founded upon the chronology of Bishop Ussher, who
maintained, in the seventeenth century, that the
world was created in seven days in the year 4004
B.C. Even if the days were taken, as by many divines
they were, to be not days at all, but periods of time of
unspecified length, it seemed difficult to reconcile
the period of 6,000 years which had elapsed since,
according to the Bible, the world began with the

42 The Present and Future of Religion

length of time required for Darwin's process, and
still more difficult to adapt it to the demands of the
geologists. According to modern estimates there has
Seen life upon the planet for roughly twelve hundred
million years, and human life for about a million ;
hence it will be seen that a very considerable prolong-
ation of the seven days is necessary.

To meet the situation the Church adopted various
expedients. Perhaps the most remarkable was that of
Sir Edmund Gosse's father, according to whom the
world had indeed been created in seven days, as
stated in Genesis, complete with fossils, the fossils
being inserted to try our faith and delude the scien-
tists. The world, in fact, had been made suddenly by
a number of separate acts of creation, but made
such as it would have been if it had evolved slowly. 1
Why God should have wished to deceive us in this
way is not clear ; so far, however, as I know, this view
is not any longer held.

Again, it was a common Christian belief that, after
the divine and semi-divine beings, man was the most
important creature in the universe. It was unfortu-
nate for this belief that Copernicus had in the fif-
teenth century destroyed the primacy of man's
planet, representing it merely as an unimportant
lump of matter, one among many, gyrating round
the sun. But hitherto his primacy upon his planet had
been unquestioned. Not only was he the centre of the

1 A similar difficulty has arisen with regard to Adam's navel.
Did Adam have a navel, or did he not ? If he did, then he was not
the first man, since navels indicate mothers. Also, Adam was made
in God's image, and there was a natural disinclination to attribute
a navel to God. If he did not, then, since all other men have un-
doubtedly had navels, Adam was not entirely and completely a
man. Therefore he was not the first man. One way out of the diffi-
culty is to suppose that God created Adam complete with navel in
order to deceive the physiologists. Adam, in other words, was
created suddenly by a divine act, but created such as he would
have been if he had had earthly parents.

The Impact of Science 43

earth's system, but it often seemed as if the rest of
the planet were only there in order to put him in the
centre, so readily had divines dropped into the com-
fortable habit of regarding the animal creation as
existing merely for the purpose of ministering to the
needs of man and providing edifying examples as
in the case of the bee or the beaver for his children.
Thus we find clergymen drawing attention to the
goodness of God in giving rabbits white tails, in order
to make them an easier target for human marksmen,
a reflection which serves to illustrate a general ten-
dency to value animals in proportion to their ability
to flatter human conceit by simulating our qualities,
or to sustain human bodies by permitting themselves
to fall victims to our guns.

Man, as the most important creature in the universe,
naturally represented the last word in created crea-
tures was he not made in God's image ? and no form
of life could, therefore, supersede him, while the
doctrine of the resurrection of the body assured his
physical characteristics of immortality.

It is impossible in the light of modern science any
longer to take this view of the human species. It is
one among many, thrown up in the course of evolu-
tion, and probably destined to be superseded and
sent to join the Mesozoic reptiles on the evolutionary
scrap-heap, so soon as it has served the purpose of
the force that created it, or life has succeeded in pro-
ducing a species better suited to carry forward the
process of evolution. A bishop of the Church of
England 1 has himself envisaged the possibility that
life, at any rate as it is manifested in human beings,
may fail a microbe, for example, may appear which
is fatal to the human race and the whole of our
species may vanish from the face of the earth, as
though it had never been. How are we to reconcile
such possibilities with the coming of the Kingdom of

1 Bishop Barnes in 1928.

44 The Present and Future of Religion

God, which will presumably be permanent and per-
fect, among human beings upon earth ?

The bearing of the theory of evolution upon the
book of Genesis is an old story now, and I do not wish
to pursue further half-forgotten controversies. But
biology is by no means the only science that has
reached results that invalidate Christian dogmas.
There is scarcely a branch of scientific research in
which discoveries have not been made which are in-
compatible with the teaching of the Church, and the
more we learn about the material universe the more
false does the Church's teaching on matters of fact
and history appear. To anyone reading the Bible with
an unprejudiced eye, it is evident that its doctrines
are based upon and relative to the scientific ideas
prevailing at the various periods when it was written.
It is even possible to trace an advance in the science,
as in the morals, of the Bible from the Old Testament
to the New. Now the scientific ideas of two thousand
years ago have been exploded and superseded. We no
longer hold the biological theory of man as a special
creation, the astronomical theory of a solid heaven
and a fixed earth, 1 the chemical theory that bread,
water, and other objects can be changed into sub-
stances of a different order by special processes, or
the physiological theory that a substance called the
soul leaves the body at death. Why, then, should we
insist upon the literal truth of dogmas inspired by
these theories and bearing the marks of their origin
plainly upon them ? To do so puts a premium upon
incredulity and brings religion and all that it stands
for into discredit.

That this is in fact the effect of such insistence is
plainly shown by the results of a questionnaire
presented to American college students by the Insti-
tute of Social and Religious Research, in connection

1 "Who laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be
removed for ever" (Psalm civ., verse 5).

The Impact of Science 45

with a comprehensive study 1 recently undertaken by
that body into the morale of American under-
graduates. The questionnaire was designed primarily
to show the changes in the religious beliefs of stu-
dents which occurred during the period spent in
college. Reporting upon the effects of university
study on the belief in the Bible, the investigators say :

In regard to changes in belief about the Bible, the largest groups
were those who changed from a belief in the literal interpretation
to a belief in the Bible as allegorical or ethical (men 30 per cent.,
women 35 per cent.), and those who retained unchanged a belief
in the Bible as an historical record (men 43 per cent. ; women 38
per cent.) . . . Many made the definite statement that their study
of science had caused them to revise their ideas as to the literal
truth of the Bible, but they nevertheless considered it the founda-
tion-stone of right living and practical religion.

Here we have a picture of a younger generation on
the whole more conservative than British university
students, who yet find their original and unmodified
religious beliefs unable to withstand the impact of
the modern conceptions of the universe with which
their education has brought them into touch. That
science, and particularly biology, is the villain of the
piece is revealed by the following naive answer to a
question on the significance of the Bible and the
authenticity of its stories.

Its significance has not changed, perhaps, because I am taking an
engineering course and not one which deals with philosophy or
evolution, I regard the Bible as history and as the word of God.

This is charming. There is vouchsafed apparently to
simple engineers a happy faith in the Bible stories of
the creation of the world, which is denied to those
imprudent enough to study science or philosophy.

1 The results of this study, which are exceedingly interesting, can
be found in Undergraduates, a Study of Morale in Twenty-Three
American Colleges and Universities. (Doubleday, Dor an, & Com-
pany, Inc., $4.)

46 The Present and Future of Religion

Particularly interesting were the answers to the
questions about obstacles to religious belief. The
largest single group (26 per cent, men ; 27 per cent,
women) cited scientific courses as the most important
obstacle.

But when every allowance has been made for the
effect of the advances that have been made in the
special sciences, in biology and geology, in physics
and astronomy, in modifying man's outlook upon
the world, it is the scientific attitude of mind in the
most general sense of the word, an attitude which is
the result of three centuries of experiment and dis-
covery, that remains the greatest danger to orthodox
belief. To analyse this attitude would take us beyond
the confines of the present book. Describing it
shortly, I should say that it consists in a new and a
juster appreciation of what it is that constitutes evi-
dence. A concrete illustration may serve to bring out
my meaning.

I have recently been reading a book which describes
the persecution of witches in Germany in the Middle
Ages. The facts revealed are sufficiently startling even
to those whose pride and pleasure it is to believe that
they have no illusions about the credulity of man-
kind. They are briefly as follows :

In the space of about fifty years during the century
immediately succeeding the Renaissance, no less than
three-quarters of a million women were burned as
witches in the area of Germany to which the re-
searches of the author of the book relate. In many
villages during this period there were no women left
alive over the age of forty ; in others, the provision of
the necessary faggots, tar, and pitch required for
burning at the stake was found, owing to the fre-
quency with which they were requisitioned, to be so
burdensome a charge upon the finances of the com-
munity that roasting alive in an oven was substituted
as being more economical. One oven, it was found,
could be used for an indefinite number of witches.

The Impact of Science 47

The question immediately presents itself, on what
grounds was such appalling suffering inflicted ? The
town and village councils who condemned the alleged
witches were composed of respectable burghers, not
over-gifted with brains perhaps, but kindly and
decent men, whose private lives were no doubt epito-
mes of all the domestic virtues. Such men would not
pass judgment on malicious or frivolous grounds ;
they would be satisfied that their condemnation was
for the good both of society and of the witches, and
that the evidence on which their verdict was based
was unimpeachable. In point of fact they held that
witches became witches through sexual intercourse
with the devil, and that, unless they were made to
confess and then burnt, their souls would suffer in
hell the torments of the damned. The infliction of
pain in the present was, therefore, a form of kindness
to the witches ; it saved them from eternal pain in the
hereafter.

But what about the evidence ? Nobody had ever seen
the witches passing through keyholes, riding on
broomsticks, or even having intercourse with the
devil. How, then, was the evidence against them ob-
tained ? The answer is simple : by their own confes-
sion.

The women admitted in every case that they had
done these things, and they made this admission
under the influence of torture. A woman suspected of
being a witch was tortured and retortured (one
woman was tortured in this way fifty-six times) until
she reached a degree of suffering at which she pre-
ferred death by burning to being tortured again ; at
this point she confessed. As part of her confession she
was compelled to name her accomplices, so that each
suspected woman became a centre of infection, from
which there radiated an ever- widening circle of fresh
suspects to be tortured and to implicate others in
their turn.

These particulars of the methods of witch-hunters

48 The Present and Future of Religion

in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Germany serve to
illustrate a change which seems to me to have come
over men's minds in the last three hundred years.
And the change consists in this, that whereas it did
not occur to the respectable German burghers to sus-
pect the validity of confessions extorted by gross
physical agony, no modern juryman would hesitate to
stigmatise information so obtained as completely un-
trustworthy. What, in short, has come into the world is
a certain respect for evidence, involving a capacity to
discriminate between what is evidence and what is not,
and this quickened appreciation of the nature of evi-
dence is in a very large measure due to science, and to
the peculiar temper of mind which science engenders.
Now I do not wish to assert that this respect for
evidence is a permanent and universal characteristic
of modern man. On the contrary, we are all of us still
credulous for part of our time, and most of us are
credulous for most of our time. That the average
scientist in matters outside his own department is no
more, and is often far less rational than the man in
the street, a few minutes' conversation on politics
with a scientific expert will quickly demonstrate.
And, when we catch the infection of a war, we throw
reason to the winds and tumble over one another in
our eagerness to relapse into a state of mediaeval
credulity. In general it may be remarked that we be-
come more credulous in proportion as the issues in
regard to which our beliefs are entertained grow more
important, the intensity with which we hold our
beliefs being usually in inverse proportion to their
truth. When the truth is known, as, for example, the
truth that two and two make four, we do not embrace
it with enthusiasm. Certainly nobody would be pre-
pared to kill or to die for the sake of this probably true
proposition. Where, however, the truth is uncertain,
we supply the place of knowledge by converting other
men's conjectures into dogmas, and then proceed to
kill those who refuse to subscribe to the dogmas. The

The Impact of Science 49

history of religion is a history of persecution for the
sake of beliefs which there is no reason to suppose to
be true. Whether, for example, the Father is of a like
nature or of the same nature as the Son is a question
obviously incapable of precise determination, and
not, one would have thought, of great importance.
Nevertheless, men have killed one another in thous-
ands, in defence of both these highly dubious
opinions.

In the light of the irrationality of the beliefs of man's
past, we must not expect too much from his present.
Fourteen years ago Germans believed that the Eng-
lish were wicked, that Germans alone were cultured,
and that God was a pro-German ; the English held
that the Germans were wicked, that England stood
for freedom and democracy, and that God was pro-
English. Each side embraced its own set of opinions
with fanatical intensity, but thought that the only
way to prove them correct was to kill off as many of
the opposing side as it possibly could. The Allies suc-
ceeded in killing more Germans than the Germans
succeeded in killing Allies, with the result that the
latter set of opinions are officially believed to have
been established that is to say, the world has been
made safe for democracy and militarism has been
overthrown, with the result that at the moment of
writing we are enjoying military despotisms in Spain,
Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia.

In spite of these aberrations the fact remains that,
when his emotions are not deeply engaged, the aver-
age man tends to require more evidence for his beliefs
than he used to do ; he is not so ready to take things
on trust, or, at any rate, not the same things. Credu-
lous to a degree about Spiritualism and Christian
Science, he tends to demand of the old creeds that
they shall provide him with reasons why he should
believe in them, and, being a true child of his age and
therefore by disposition a materialist, he is inclined
to be unduly contemptuous of all evidence that would

DR

5O The Present and Future of Religion

not be regarded as such by the physicist in his labora-
tory. Nothing exists, he is inclined to say, except
those things of which his five senses inform him ; in
other words, only material things exist. Such an atti-
tude of mind, more often implicit than avowed, deter-
mines the approach of many to religion to-day, and it
is small wonder that religion, judged by an arbitrary
and often inappropriate test, fails to qualify.

Realising the danger to the whole structure of relig-
ion whicn science threatens, there are some within
the Church itself who plead for a modification of
religious dogmas in the light of our new knowledge,
andurge that, in its own interests, the Church should
not teach doctrines that conflict with the plain facts
about the universe that science has dicovered. A New
Commentary on the Bible, which appeared at the close
of 1928, edited by Bishop Gore and published by the
Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge,
may be taken as representative of the more moderate
school of advanced Christian thought.

Reviewing it, the Bishop of Liverpool pointed out
that the Bible is, "rather a library of books, the writers
of which, at various times and in various conditions
of life, by divers pictures and in divers manners, de-
clared their ideas about God and His dealings with
man. . . these are not intended to be understood as
narratives of fact, but as vehicles of teaching."

The plain meaning of this seems to be that the Bible
is not "the word of God," but a collection of human
writings embodying human and, therefore, fallible
ideas. In other words, doubt of all religious dogmas is
admissible, while some namely, those which pur-
port to be narratives of actual fact must not be taken
to mean what they say.

This is a considerable advance. The doctrines re-
jected by the New Commentary as " not intended to
be understood as narratives of fact" have been in-
sisted on with passionate emphasis as forming part of
a supreme divine revelation. They include the Crea-

The Impact of Science 51

tion story, the Flood story, the stories of David and
Goliath, and of Jonah and the whale. These, it seems,
are not historical, are probably untrue, and form no
part of a divine revelation. What are the inferences ?

(1) The Bible is a purely human production.

(2) The human mind is entitled to use its reason to
determine what parts of it are valuable and what are
not.

(3) The vast majority of Christian authorities have
been mistaken

(a) in claiming the Bible as divine revelation ;

(b) in declaiming against Biblical criticism,
which is now recognised to be our chief guide in
determining which, if any, parts of the Bible are
true.

A remarkable set of admissions from the leaders of
an institution which for two thousand years has
claimed superhuman authority ! It is a little surpris-
ing to find the "Commentators" accepting the bodily
resurrection of Jesus on the ground that the evidence
for it is "clear, sufficient, and convincing." The evi-
dence for the Resurrection consists of a disputable
inference from extremely uncircumstantial references
to a supernatural occurrence made by unknown
writers in a grossly superstitious age. The test of
probability, moreover, which the writers have ac-
cepted as admissible in dealing with the Old Testa-
ment stories, is here abandoned, for, assuming the
Resurrection to have been a real occurrence bearing
witness to the supernatural government of the uni-
verse, one may well ask whether the supernatural
agency responsible for the occurrence would, in fair-
ness to the human race, have omitted to provide first-
hand, unimpeachable evidence for so important an
event. Or are we to suppose that God, whom Sir
Edmund Gosse's father credited with the creation of
fossils to bamboozle the scientists, is exhibiting the
same mischievous humour in His mystification of the

52 The Present and Future of Religion

Biblical critics ? It is scarcely probable, yet it is what
the "Commentators," under the sway of a pre-
formed theory of the divinity of Jesus, apparently ask
us to believe. And then there are the Christian dog-
mas of heaven and of hell. Are these retained ? It is
not clear, yet there is no doubt of their distressing
effect upon the modern mind. The Christian concep-
tion of hell it finds frankly revolting. Nor should this
attitude occasion surprise. It is said that Whitefield
preached men dead at his feet by his picture of the
torments of the damned, and even so recent a
preacher as the great Spurgeon emphasised the reality
of a physical hell. This horrible doctrine has always
been implied even when it has not been emphasised.
Even when the preacher did not explicitly threaten
his congregation, they would be reminded of the fate
that awaited them by some hymn telling them, for
example, how they were destined " to inherit bliss
unending or an eternity of woe." Of recent vears it
has dropped into the background, but it is still there,
a skeleton in the cupboard of the Church's teaching,
whose bones can on occasion still be rattled to
frighten the wicked. But the world has repudiated it,
and in doing so has lost much of its respect for a
religion whose appeal was addressed largely to men's
fears.

And what of "the bliss unending" ? It has fared little
better, the modern man finding the Church's picture
of an after-life as unreal as it is unattractive. A more
boring sort of life for the average Englishman it
would be impossible to conceive. With no huntin', no
fishin', no motorin', no shootin', with nothing to
frighten and nothing to kill, above all with no little
round bits of matter to be fiercely or deliberately hit
with long, thin ones in the shape of bats, cues, clubs,
mallets, or racquets, a heaven so ill equipped cannot
it is obvious be expected to appeal to the tastes of
a sporting man. Women too are apt to find it lacking
in emotional colour.

The Impact of Science 53

The concepts of heaven and hell have played no
little part in discrediting Christianity, and a religion
that is to survive will have to jettison them as obsolete
lumber. Yet the Church, if it does not insist on them,
does not explicitly discard them.

The Bible, again, contains many statements of fact
which modern science has, to say the least of it, ren-
dered doubtful. Some of them are statements about
the structure of reality, e.g. "The Holy Ghost pro-
ceeded from the Father and the Son" ; others about
what purport to be historical events, e.g. "Jesus de-
scended into hell." Is belief in statements of this type
still made a test of faith ? It is not clear. The miracles,
however, are retained, inadvisably, as it seems to me.
And not only to me ; for Bishop Barnes and the more
advanced among the Modernists openly avow the
miracles to be one of the greatest stumbling-blocks to
the acceptance of the Christian faith. In the circum-
stances their enthusiasm for the New Commentary is
qualified.

"A recent commentary on the Bible in which Bishop
Gore's influence has been paramount concedes evolu-
tion and seeks to retain miracles. The concession,
which virtually no one disputes, undermines that au-
thority of the Bible, on which the whole Anglican
position is built." So Bishop Barnes, preaching in
Westminster Abbey. The authority of the Bible being
undermined, why insist on the miracles ? It is not
clear. "The vast majority of living churchmen," the
Bishop continued, "who have felt the influence of
scientific method find miracles no aid to faith." A
masterly example of the art of under-statement !
"That God can alter the mode of expression of His
will no one doubts, but that He actually takes or has
taken in the past such action is now generally
doubted" although not, apparently, by the Anglican
Church as a whole, which still insists on the miracles
as an article of faith.

The process of being rational about Christian dog-

54 The Present and Future of Religion

mas is, it is clear, only in its infancy. At present its
operations are irregular and its incidence capricious.
If it is to save Christianity, it must it is obvious
go further. Yet already it has gone too far, for the
religious dogmatists who dominate the Church are
giving nothing away, and zealots complain that the
Modernists are betraying the citadel from within.
Hence they are pressed for adherence to the strict
letter of the Church's doctrines, the Incarnation, the
Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection of the
Body ; and, replying that these are symbolic truths,
or that they should be interpreted in a spiritual sense,
they are accused of being hypocrites and charlatans,
seeking to remain in the Church, while disbelieving
her doctrines. Part of the trouble is that many of the
more intelligent clergy are in advance of their flocks.
Confronted with the apparent fact, confirmed by Holy
Scripture, that the earth is flat, and believing in their
hearts that the stars are spangles of bright gold that
will fall from heaven like a shower of hot hail at the
Second Coming, simple congregations are confounded
to find prominent men in their own Church bowing
the knee to science, which denies these things.
Hence arises the demand put forward by the more
conservative churchmen that men like Bishop Barnes
and Dean Inge should either subscribe fully, openly,
and literally to the Thirty-Nine Articles or should
leave the Church. It is this claim to finality by the
Church a claim which means that the ideas of two
thousand years ago are true absolutely, completely,
and for all time that is chiefly responsible for its loss
of influence to-day. "We need/' as the Bishop of
Birmingham has said, "to re-fashion both dogma and
worship by joining the spiritual intention of Jesus to
the understanding of the universe. In fact, such a re-
formulation of faith is the main duty of Christian
leaders during the next generation." No doubt ! But
it seems unlikely that the duty will be performed. Yet
unless the Church can bring herself to let her most

The Impact of Science 55

enlightened representatives move with the times, and,
while retaining the spiritual message of Christianity,
discard the outworn science of Christian theology,
that influence will wane until it has vanished alto-
gether. The Churches, no doubt, will continue to
function for a time, but they will be attended increas-
ingly, and in the end exclusively, by ignorant men,
women, and children. Already a stranger attending
an average Church of England service would almost
be justified in assuming that the Churches, like
theatre matinees, were kept up for the benefit of
women and children. So far as present indications go,
it seems not unlikely that science will deliver the coup
de grace to organised Christianity within the next hun-
dred years. It is probable, however, that the services
of the English Churches will still retain an interest for
overseas visitors for many years to come, and it is
quite conceivable that the Church, in company with
me House of Commons and the Royal Family, may
ultimately be subsidised as a picturesque survival by
a syndicate of American millionaires sentimentally
anxious to retain links with the past.

If by some miracle the Church regains its power, it
will sterilise scientific thought and retard human pro-
gress by putting a ban on scientific experiment and
discovery. This might not matter were it not for the
fact that, as the world is organised at present, the re-
sult of the cessation of scientific research in Christian
countries would be to leave us as defenceless against
the non-Christian races, armed with science, as were
the Asiatics against the Christian races in the nine-
teenth century.

Chapter IV
THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

Chapter IV
THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. 0.
WILDE.

It remains to estimate the influence of "the spirit of
the age." The phrase is an ambiguous one, and its
meaning varies according to the context in which it is
used. As I understand it, however, it is intended to
imply a particular attitude to life that, namely, of
most young men and women between the ages of
seventeen and thirty to-day ; and it is in this sense
that I shall use it. The attitude is complex and is the
product of a number of different factors. Three, I
think, may be specially distinguished, and I shall say
a few words about each of them.

There is, in the first place, the reaction on the part of
each generation from the manners and morals of the
last, a reaction which, in the generation which grew to
maturity in the early twentieth century, was more than
usually marked ; there is the influence of the new psy-
chology in general and of psycho-analysis in partic-
ular, and there are the effects of the war.

And here I wish to anticipate a difficulty to which I
have already made a passing reference. These three
factors, and a number of others which I have not
specified, have contributed, I say, to produce a cer-
tain attitude to life, and this attitude, I hold, is one of
the causes of the decay of religious belief. But is the
word "causes" really appropriate ? Might it not,
ought it not indeed, to be "effects" ? And my diffi-
culty is precisely this, that I do not know how far the
decline in religious belief and the apparent atrophy of
the religious sense are due, at least in part, to the
prevalence of an attitude to life which has grown up
concurrently with, but independently of, them, and
how far they have contributed to form that attitude.
Admittedly the two are inextricably interwoven, the

60 The Present and Future of Religion

growth of the one assisting and being assisted by the
decline of the other ; so that in describing, as I have
tried to do in the next chapter (which has got itself
written first), the effects upon contemporary morals
and manners of the religious scepticism of the age, I
find myself including among them some of the
characteristics of the particular attitude to life which
I am here asserting to be one of the causes of that
scepticism. There is a vicious circle here, and those
who seek to distinguish cause from effect do but
perambulate its circumference. Because men's belief
in the next world has declined, they behave in a cer-
tain way in this one, and the effect of their behaviour
is to destroy the remaining vestiges of their belief.
Thus men's creeds are at once the prop and the
mirror of their lives, and reflect a morality which only
they have made inevitable. *But it is time to return
to the " spirit of the age."

I . First among its constituents I have noted the reac-
tion of the present generation from the morals and
beliefs of the Victorian age. The inevitable repudia-
tion by each generation of the standards and values of
the last is a commonplace, and I need not enlarge on
it here, except to remark that it goes some way to
explain the repulsion felt by the twentieth century for
the piety of the nineteenth. In all ages children have
seemed to find in their parents warnings rather than
examples, and have shown their sense of the effect of
parental instruction by disregarding it to the best of
their ability. Thus the sons of parsons become prize-
fighters or take to the stage, while the children of
Bohemians are remarkable for the ordered austerity
of their lives. It is for this reason that old women and
middle-aged men in every generation regard their
youngers as immoral, irreverent, decadent, and scepti-
cal, and inform each other that the world is going to
the dogs, an expression by which they seek to convey
their sense of protest against the movement of evolu-
tion for having passed them by. "When I was young,

The Spirit of the Age 61

Mr. Lydgate," says old Mrs. Fairbrother in George
Eliot's Middlemarchy "there never was any question
of right and wrong. We knew our Catechism and our
duty. Every respectable Church person had the same
opinions. But now, if you speak out of the Prayer
Book itself, you are liable to be contradicted." Mrs.
Fairbrother might have been speaking in the twen-
tieth century : her period is, in fact, almost exactly a
hundred years ago. Meanwhile, we may note in pass-
ing that each generation, in reacting from its pre-
decessor, returns to the generation before its prede-
cessor, thus taking the gods of its grandfathers off
the shelf upon which its fathers have placed them.
Thus we have the present enthusiasm for the eigh-
teenth century, and strive to model ourselves in morals
and beliefs, or rather in the lack of both, upon the
intellectuals of the France of Louis XV. With, how-
ever, one important exception : in the age of Voltaire
and Gibbon, the age of reason and logic, women tried
to talk like men ; in the age of Freud and Bergson, the
age of instinct and unreason, men try to talk like
women.

II. The tendency to react from parental standards,
operative in every age, has been intensified in our
own by two factors of a somewhat special character.
The new psychology in general and psycho-analysis
in particular have had an influence upon the codes
and conduct of the younger generation, the extent of
which is not generally acknowledged. The general
effect of the teaching of the psycho-analysts is to lead
people to think that the springs of action are to be
located not in the conscious, but in the unconscious
part of our natures. Here is to be found the seat of
individuality, the very centre and citadel of the self.
Consequently the desires and impulses which appear
in consciousness, proceeding as they do from the
unconscious, may be regarded as the natural out-
cropping and expression of the self. But conscious-
ness is also impregnated with other elements, which

62 The Present and Future of Religion

are derived not from the individual, but from his
environment ; they are, speaking broadly, the reflec-
tion of the social codes and standards of the com-
munity to which he belongs. Society, said Schopen-
hauer, is like a collection of hedgehogs driven together
for the sake of warmth. Naturally the spikes prick
unless they are well felted ; hence arise manners and
morals of which the function is so to felt the spikes of
individualistic behaviour that the pricking is reduced
to a minimum. The community being chiefly con-
cerned to maintain a minimum standard of uniform
law-abiding conduct among its members, the in-
fluence which it exerts upon the individual's con-
sciousness takes the form of a series of checks and
inhibitions upon the impulses which spring from the
natural man within him. These are usually adminis-
tered by the conscience, which is the policeman of
society, implanted in the individual to safeguard
social interests. Thus there is a continual conflict be-
tween the individual's natural and his social self, in
which the latter endeavours to restrain the departures
of the former from the currently accepted set of
prejudices, preferences, and observances which the
community pretentiously calls its morals. To take a
personal illustration, I cannot abide the sight of a red-
haired man wearing a straw hat, the impulse of my
natural man being to hit the red-haired man violently
in the face, to knock off the hat, or otherwise express
my disapproval. But there is no social prejudice
against the wearing of straw hats by red-haired men.
Consequently my social man, schooled in the observ-
ances of the community to which he belongs and
automatically reflecting them, reproves the idiosyn-
crasies of the natural man and sternly represses as
anti-social any attempt to express them in action.
Anti-social action may be defined as behaviour in a
manner other than that which the community ex-
pects. This applies even to the unexpected answer :
the Japanese term for a rude man, for example, is an

The Spirit of the Age 63

"other than expected fellow," and, under the old
laws, a noble is not to be interfered with in cutting
down a man who has behaved to him in a way which
he did not anticipate.

Now the successful repression of the natural man by
the social man has, on the whole, been regarded in the
main as a sign of advance. Man, it has been urged,
chiefly differs from the animals in his ability to disci-
pline and control his instincts in the interests of some
end which he regards as valuable. Without such con-
trol society becomes impossible. Were we to bash the
face of every red-haired straw-hatted man who an-
noyed us, capture and make away with every girl that
attracted us, and appropriate the goods of our neigh-
bours at the first opportunity, the ordered security of
society would relapse into the anarchy of the jungle,
and intercourse between individuals would be in-
distinguishable from intercourse between nations,
which still, on the whole, conforms to jungle ethics.
Now society is an achievement ; in it and through it
alone a man may develop his tastes and realise all that
he has it in him to be. Hence whatever threatens the
stability of society has been regarded with disfavour,
and the efforts of the individual's social man to sup-
press the aberrations of his natural man have usually
had the support of public opinion.

Owing to the influence of psycho-analysis, the view
that this suppression is desirable is no longer held
with its traditional force. The impulses and desires
which appear in consciousness spring, as we have
seen, from the innermost source of our being. Now,
every individual has, it is said, a right to complete
self-expression. What is the purpose of democracy if
it is not to give him that right ? But the right is not
respected by asking him to starve one side of his
nature in the interests of a code of morals to which
he has never subscribed, designed to secure a social
good in which he feels no interest. He has also a right
to psychological health. But the writings of Freud

64 The Present and Future of Religion

have told him that, if the libido is suppressed, his
personality will suffer. The stream of impulses and
desires, the spontaneous uprush of his ego, which
finds its natural outlet stopped, is turned back upon
itself, stagnates, and spreads into a rank and foetid
marsh. This marsh is the complex, a terrible affair
which poisons and infects the whole personality, with
the result that the victim pays in hysteria, depression,
and neurosis the price of the suppression and distor-
tion of the desires of his youth. The moral is self-
expression and self-development at all costs ; give
free play to every side of your nature, and don't be
deterred by the Mrs. Grundys of society from the
experiences which the unfolding of your personality
demands.

From the ethical point of view all indulgence is com-
mended except indulgence in self-restraint, and we
are urged to get rid of our temptations by yielding to
them.

The doctrine of self-expression, to which psycho-
analysis has given pseudo-scientific countenance, does
not exhaust the effects of modern psychology upon
contemporary creeds and codes. There is a markedly
deterministic strain in the writings of modern psy-
chologists. It is suggested that our actions proceed
not from the conscious activities of will and reason,
but from deep-seated forces within ourselves whose
genesis escapes detection and whose workings evade
control. But, if this is so, we cannot be held respon-
sible for what we do.

Nor are the workings of these forces confined to
their effect upon our actions. They dominate equally
pur beliefs, which are merely rationalisations of our
instinctive wishes. Hence, we are not responsible for
what we believe, nor, which is more to our present
purpose, for what we disbelieve. This conclusion be-
gets an attitude fatalistic as regards action and scep-
tical as regards thought. Since we cannot help doing
what we do do, to tell us what we ought to ao is an

The Spirit of the Age 65

irrational impertinence. Hence, we may as well do
what we like. Since we believe what we do, not be-
cause it is true, not even because we have examined
the evidence and think it true, but because we are pre-
disposed in favour of the belief in question by our
wishes, and biased by our temperaments because, in
other words, we are made that way to advance argu-
ments or to produce evidence in favour of a belief is a
waste of breath.

I shall examine in more detail in the next chapter
the practical bearing of this repudiation of moral and
intellectual responsibility upon people's actions and
beliefs. Meanwhile, I shall try briefly to show how
the conclusions of modern psychologists lend it coun-
tenance. Let us return for a moment to psycho-
analysis.

The plan of the psychological interior of the indivi-
dual drawn by the disciples of Freud may be likened
to that of a two-floored tenement. The first floor is
inhabited by a quiet, respectable family, poor but
honest, dull but decent, anxious to keep themselves
to themselves, but determined to put up a good show
before their neighbours. Upon the ground floor, or,
if you prefer it, in the basement, there lives a much
larger family, dirty, untidy, primitive, obstreperous,
and licentious, devoid alike of decency and restraint.
Possessing to the full the snobbishness inherent in the
lower orders, this basement family is continually striv-
ing to raise itself in the social scale, and, partly for
this reason, partly from love of scandal and desire for
publicity, is desperately anxious to get a footing on
the first floor and to mix with the company to be
found there. Alarmed and scandalised by these des-
perate attempts, the first-floor people hire a sort of
guardian or policeman, and station him on the stair-
case in order to prevent the access of undesirables to
their floor. Sometimes the policeman succeeds in
keeping the basement people down ; sometimes he is
not strong enough to withstand their uprush. In this
ER

66 The Present and Future of Religion

latter event, however, he usually succeeds in cleaning
up the invaders en route, washing their faces, blowing
tneir noses, giving them clean collars, brushing their
clothes, and generally making them fit for company.
So respectable do they indeed become that they
scarcely know themselves in this new guise. If we call
the first floor the conscious, the basement the un-
conscious, and the guardian on the stairs the censor,
we shall recognise in the cleaning-up process what is
known by psycho-analysts as sublimation, which may
so completely disguise the character of the uncon-
scious wish which appears in consciousness that a
man's unconscious desire to elope with a waitress may
appear in consciousness as a sudden aversion from
pickled cabbage.

Now the uprush of these desires from the uncon-
scious to the conscious is a completely unconscious
process ; so far as consciousness is concerned, we can
neither prevent nor control it. In order to control the
events which occur in the unconscious, it is at least
necessary to know what these events are. But, if we
knew them, the unconscious would not be uncon-
scious, but conscious. It is true that a resistance is put
up to our unconscious desires by the censor, and a
struggle ensues, which may result in suppression and
usually results in sublimation. But of this struggle on
the stairs we are again not conscious, and for its out-
come we are not, therefore, responsible. It seems,
therefore, that we cannot be held responsible for the
desires that appear in the conscious ; we are account-
able neither for their strength nor for their character.
We cannot, therefore, be praised or blamed for the
conduct upon which, under the influence of these
desires, we embark.

Fatalistic conclusions of this type are by no means
confined to psycho-analysis. They are implied in most
modern psychology, though they are rarely drawn by
psychologists. Let us consider for a moment a theory
which bulks largely in psychological text-books

The Spirit of the Age 67

Professor McDougalTs theory of instinct. Professor
McDougall begins by defining an instinct as "an in-
herited or innate psycho-physical disposition, which
determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay at*
tention to, objects of a certain class, to experience an
emotional excitement of a particular quality upon
perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in
a particular manner, or, at least, to experience an im-
pulse to such action." The upshot of this in non-
technical language is that an instinct is part of our
initial temperamental make-up, the psychological
stock-in-trade which we bring with us into the world,
the very seat and citadel of our individuality.

The form of its expression will, of course, vary ac-
cording to circumstances, upbringing, and so torth,
but the instinct which is expressed is the same in all
of us. McDougall holds that there are thirteen separ-
ate instincts which may be defined in this manner,
and these instincts, with the thirteen primary emo-
tions, each of which accompanies an instinct as the
peculiar emotion belonging to that instinct, consti-
tute when taken together what may be called our
personal or inherited, as opposed to our acquired,
psychology. For this initial psychological endowment
it is clear that we are not responsible ; we possess it,
or, rather, we possess the potentiality for it at birth,
and in reaction to the environment in which we find
ourselves it develops and becomes explicit, until in due
course it crystallises into what we call our personality.

The instincts are, according to McDougall, the
source and origin of all our activities. On this point he
speaks definitely and emphatically. "The instincts are
the prime movers of all human activity ; by the cpna-
tive or impulsive force of some instinct, every train of
thought, however cold and passionless it may seem,
is borne along towards its end. All the complex appa-
ratus of the most highly developed mind is but the
instrument by which these impulses seek their satis-
faction."

68 The Present and Future of Religion

Now we are all familiar with that view of people's
motives which assigns to the reason the function of
handmaid to the desires. It is desire which sets the
ends of our activities, which determines, in other
words, what we want, and reason which plans the
steps which are necessary for its attainment. This
function reason performs not only in the practical
sphere, but also in the theoretical ; it not only tells us,
in other words, how to do what we want to do, but
assures us that what we want to do is right and that
what we want to believe is true. The reason of David,
for example, indicates to him that the way to get hold
of Bathsheba is to get rid of Uriah ; it also informs
him that Uriah is a very excellent soldier. Thus reason
invents pretexts for what we instinctively wish to do,
and arguments for what we instinctively wish to be-
lieve. That is why, though all men are presented with
the same data on which to form a judgment about the
relationship between this world and the next, they
succeed in holding so many different beliefs. We be-
lieve what we believe, not on the basis of the evidence,
but because we desire to believe it ; we also find it
necessary to believe that it is the evidence which has
constrained our belief. Savages who have not brought
their reasons to the degree of perfection common to
civilised men are not under this necessity of deceiving
themselves about their motives. When the savage
wants to go to war, he goes to war ; he does not find
it necessary first to persuade himself that he is fight-
ing for liberty and democracy. Not being reason-
able, he is enabled to indulge his instincts without
hypocrisy.

Now, I am not here concerned either to assert or to
deny the correctness of this view of the relationship
between instinct or desire and reason. All that I wish
to do is to point out that it follows necessarily from
McDougall s account of the function of instinct.
According to that account, the reason is merely a
piece of mechanism ; it is the engine of the person-

The Spirit of the Age 69

ality, and desire is the steam that sets it going. Since
it can accomplish nothing by itself, since it cannot
even begin to operate on its own initiative, it follows
that it can come into action only at the behest of
instinct, its master. It is only natural, therefore, that,
when it does get under way, it should travel along the
lines which its master has pointed out to it.

Let us consider the bearing of this conclusion upon
the so-called moral faculties. Let us suppose that Mc-
Dougall's view of instinct as the prime mover of all
human activity is correct, and proceed to apply it to
the will. The philosopher Aristotle used to liken the
psychology of the individual to a team of horses en-
gaged in drawing a chariot under the control of a
charioteer. The horses are wild and unruly, and each
of them is anxious to go his own way irrespective of
the wishes of the others. Unless, therefore, the driver
were to keep them under strict control, the chariot
would follow the pull of the strongest horse at the
moment, or, rather, its course would be a resultant of
the different directions in which all the horses were
pulling at that moment, without actually following
any of them. In any event, the driver would be in-
capable of keeping to a straight course in a given
direction, so that, instead of arriving at its destina-
tion, the chariot would pursue a haphazard, zigzag
path, swaying from side to side, if not overturning
altogether. In order to prevent this, the charioteer
keeps a tight hold on the reins and refuses to give any
of the horses his head. This does not mean that he
suppresses them altogether, but that he allows to each
one only so much of his way as is compatible with the
satisfaction of the others and the necessity which the
chariot is under of completing its course.

Translating this analogy into the terms of human
psychology, we may say that the horses are our in-
dividual instincts or desires. Each individual desire
is purely self-regarding, and, provided that it can
obtain satisfaction for itself, takes no thought for the

70 The Present and Future of Religion

welfare of the rest. But besides these individual
desires there is also a desire for the good of the whole,
that is to say, the charioteer, which keeps the indivi-
dual desires in check, constraining them to dovetail
their imperious demands and harmonising them in
such a way that no single desire shall obtain more
satisfaction than is compatible with the welfare of the
human being as a whole. It is this desire for the good
of the whole which is called the will.
The argument sounds, I fear, more convincing than
it is. If we consider this account of the will in the light
of McDougall's theory of instinct, we get the follow-
ing result : Either the will is itself a form of desire or
it is not. If it is not, it is clear that it cannot be
brought into operation unless we desire to exercise it.
It may be true that we can use the will to suppress
inconvenient longings, but we can do so only in
so far as we first want to suppress the longings be-
cause they are inconvenient. Translating this into
McDougall's language, we may say that, unless we are
instinctively moved to use the will to suppress instinc-
tive desires, the will is helpless. Either, then, the will
is itself a form of desire, or it is something which de-
pends upon desire for its operation. But, if the will is
only another kind of desire, or is dependent upon
another desire, it is clear that it must take its chance
along with the other desires. If I desire to stay at
a night club and get drunk, but also desire to go home
to bed because my conscience tells me that night
clubs are wicked, or because I think I shall have a
headache to-morrow, we may, if we like, call the
second desire the will to suppress the first one. But
that should not blind us to the fact that, like the
night-club desire, it is itself a desire, or at least de-
pends upon desire, that a conflict will take place be-
tween the two desires in which victory will go to the
stronger, and that what we actually do is determined,
therefore, by the strongest of our various desires at
the moment. But for the strength of our instincts and

The Spirit of the Age 71

desires we are not responsible. It seems to follow
that we are not responsible for what we do. We are
determined, in short, not by forces external to our-
selves, but by forces and impulses call them in-
stincts, desires, or what you will that lie deep down
at the well-springs of our nature. This may seem to
many a less humiliating belief than that of the nine-
teenth-century materialists, but it is not free will.
What is more, it effectively precludes free will.

The bearing of all this upon morality is sufficiently
obvious, nor can it, I think, be doubted that the prac-
tical fatalism in matters of conduct in which these
theories issue is a potent ingredient in "the spirit of
the age."

III. The third special factor in the modern attitude
to life to which I wish to draw attention is the in-
fluence of the war. The war, while directly violating
every principle that the religion of the nineteenth cen-
tury professed to regard as sacred, swept men of
every age and creed off their feet in a common wave
of enthusiasm. It was then discovered that the one
thing which can effectively unite men is the one thing
that they all know to be wrong. But, in spite of this
knowledge, they nevertheless affirmed that it was
right, invoking their religion to sanction their desires
by one of the most remarkable pieces of hypocrisy by
which men's unscrupulousness has imposed upon
their credulity.

Knowing and affirming that might is not right, they
nevertheless acted as if the only way of demonstra-
ting the justice of your cause was to kill off as many of
the other side as you possibly could. If your killing
was more extensive than that of the enemy, you were
said to have achieved a victory, which was held in
some mysterious way to demonstrate your superior
moral virtue. Knowing that killing is wrong, they
nevertheless insisted that an exception has been made
in the case of people you have never seen, whom you
killed by order of the State. Knowing and believing

72 The Present and Future of Religion

in the Christian religion, they nevertheless impris-
oned many of those who drew attention to the teach-
ing of Christ, and endeavoured to act in accordance
with it. And so on, and so on.

These proceedings, which are no doubt very natural
on the part of a people at war, are not calculated to
impress a critically minded younger generation with
the moral sincerity of its elders, especially when it
finds that it is expected to fight in the war that its
elders have made. In the last war the young men
suffered in the trenches while the old men uttered
moral platitudes in the background, an allocation of
functions which was not calculated to inspire the
young with respect for the old, or to cause them to
pay much attention to the platitudes. As a conse-
quence, the war has brought a disrespect for author-
ity of all kinds. The old men, we feel, have made a
terrible mess of things and then proceeded to cover
it up with moral sentiments. Whatever we do, we
cannot do much worse, and we might as well cut out
the moral sentiments. Hence, the very fact that
morality, self-discipline, and restraint are enshrined
in tradition and enjoined by authority is a sufficient
reason for regarding them as suspect and throwing
them to the winds.

In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a remarkable con-
fusion between moral and ethical questions as a
whole, and that comparatively small part of them
which is concerned with sexual behaviour. So deep-
seated is this confusion that for many people the
word "morality" means simply "sexual abstinence."
Owing to this confusion, a revolt from the standards
and ways of thought of the Victorians has taken the
form of a repudiation of sexual restraints. If the war
unmasked the values of the Victorians, if it showed
their morality to be hypocrisy and exhibited their
religion as a series of conventional formulae, why
bother with such people any longer ? It is clear that
their boasted virtue can have been no virtue at all, for

The Spirit of the Age 73

look at its results ! And, looking at them, the young
go in for an extensive course of sleeping around."

Similarly with regard to religion. The Victorians be-
lieved hard in God and went to Church in shoals.
Their God was it is clear a vindictive, jealous old
gentleman, a tribal deity, grossly, partial, and ad-
dicted to blood, especially German blood. Against
such a God the young emphatically protest. "If,"
they say, "there is such a Being and we hope there
is not we certainly cannot worship Him. Still less
can we bore ourselves by stuffily praising Him in
church. It is a fine day. Let's go out in the car."

Chapter V
THE RESULTS

Chapter V
THE RESULTS

People to-day want a gospel for life, and only
not given it. 1

The Press has recently devoted a considerable^
amount of space to cases of suicide among the young.
These have attracted attention because they appear to
proceed less from any concrete, assignable cause than
from a general dislike of existence as such. A girl
throws herself out of a window because she is tired
of life ; a young man, the son of a sergeant in the Sal-
vation Army, seeks death under the wheels of a tram
because he can no longer reconcile his experience of
the world with what he has been taught to believe.
The English call those who kill themselves insane,
and puzzled coroners, accustomed to pronounce
upon those temporarily "maddened" by financial
troubles or thwarted love, refer these voluntary
deaths proceeding from affairs neither of the pocket
nor of the heart to abstractions such as "the unrest
of youth," or "the spirit of the age."
It is no spiritual malaise peculiar to the atmosphere
of England that is responsible for these occurrences.
On the contrary, the evidence seems to show that we
in England are being visited by an epidemic whose
ravages, extending over the whole of Western civilis-
ation, have so far touched us but lightly. "Suicide
epidemic among American students," says the morn-
ing paper, and proceeds to tell us that suicides among
students had at the time of writing been at the rate of
one a week for the past eight weeks. None of the
deaths recorded were due to external causes, but to
what is ambiguously described as "mental trouble."
"Mental trouble" appears to resolve itself in one case
into a frustrated love affair, in another into drug-

1 The Bishop of Gloucester's Presidential Address to the Church
Congress, 1928.

78 The Present and Future of Religion

taking, into a clash of beliefs in a third, and into being
bored in a fourth. "The student XY," we are told,
put his head in a gas-oven "because he was 'tired of
the girls 1 and didn't know what to do with himself/ 1
And so on.

In Berlin the death-rate by suicide among young
men under twenty-five is reputed as high as one-
tenth per cent. The Germans, it should be remem-
bered, take their ideas seriously. For Russia, where
they take them not only seriously but extravagantly,
so that one does not so much have ideas as suffer
from a rush of thought to the head, no precise figures
are available, but the government are understood to
have taken severe measures to prevent people killing
themselves, presumably by punishing the offenders
with death !

The epidemic seems to have been occasioned by an
outbreak of thought consequent upon the breakdown
of traditional beliefs. I do not mean to suggest that
thinking about life necessarily leads to the conclusion
that life is not worth living. Far from it. Upon the
comparative merits of being alive and being dead the
philosopher, indeed, is required to keep an open
mind. Socrates, about to drink the hemlock, rebuked
his friends, who advocated escape, pointing out that,
as we do not know what being dead is like, there is no
ground for the assumption that it is worse than being
alive ; it is just as likeiy to be better. Hence, a reason-
able man will neither seek nor avoid a state whose
merits or demerits, compared with those of his pres-
ent existence, are unknown to him. But this is less an
argument for suicide than against a craven fear of
death.

It is, however, true that it is upon the most intelli-
gent that life bears most hardly. Schopenhauer went
so far as to assert a natural incompatibility between
intelligence and happiness. The more complex the
human mechanism becomes, the greater the chances
that it will go wrong. Refinement of the spirit brings

The Results 79

greater sensibility to pain, while increased capacity
for thought enables us to perceive illusions the more
readily. The intelligent man finds it hard to believe,
harder still to find an ideal which, by winning the re-
spect of his intellect, can claim the allegiance of his
heart. Throughout the history of philosophy runs the
antithesis, "Which would you sooner be, Socrates
dissatisfied, or a pig satisfied ?" with the implication
that it is harder for Socrates to come by satisfaction
than for a pig.

That those who kill themselves are usually men and
women of exceptional intelligence should not, there-
fore, occasion surprise. But young people have been
intelligent in all ages and yet consented to live. What,
then, are the reasons for the abnormal crop of sui-
cides in our own ? They are, I think, very largely to
be sought in the lack of religious faith and feeling
whose causes I have been analysing.

The effects of the decay in religious belief make
themselves felt in two ways. In the first place, men
are left without guidance as to the ultimate nature
and purpose of the universe, and the status and des-
tiny of the human spirit. Nor can they easily direct
themselves. The average man does not make his relig-
ion any more than he makes his morals for himself.
He does not even compare the various alternative
systems of religions and morals that others have
made, and choose the one which suits him best. He
gets his religious and ethical beliefs, as he gets his
boots and clothes, ready made from the social shop,
upholding Christianity and monogamy instead of
Allah and polygamy, as the result of circumstances
which are, in the last resort, purely topographical.
That I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and
God the Holy Ghost (if I do) because I happen to
have been born in a London bedroom and not in a
forest hut or a Chinese palace is a reflection preju-
dicial to the dignity of the human mind, and is, there-
fore, rarely made. It is true, nevertheless.

8o The Present and Future of Religion

Now, there are times when the spiritual clothes that
our age purveys tend to misfit. In this respect, as I
pointed out in the first chapter, the generation which
has come to maturity since the war is unfortunate.
Most of what it has traditionally been taught about
the nature of the universe and the destiny of the soul
is, as we have seen, at variance with what science has
discovered and with a plain reading of its personal
experience. The discomfort produced in an earnest
and sensitive mind by this discrepancy between the
dogmas which it has been taught to believe and the
facts of which it is informed by experience and edu-
cation may be very acute.

Most men have a need to believe. They like to be
told what to think and what to do ; that is why the
Church and the Army have always been their two most
popular institutions. So intolerable is it for them to
have to think things out for themselves that they are
willing to regard any dogma as embodying the last
word in absolute truth, and any code of morals as
constituting a final and unquestioned criterion of
right and wrong, if it is presented to them with a
sufficiently authoritative backing. What is more, they
will be prepared, if put to it, to defend the code and
the dogma to the last ounce of their energy and the
last drop of their blood, regarding it as the height of
wickedness to act and think otherwise than in accord-
ance with them, and inflicting appalling cruelties
upon all who venture to do so. That the Holy Ghost
proceeds from the Father and from the Son, or
that he proceeds from the Father only, that bread
and wine are or are not body and blood, or that in
some mysterious sense they both are and are not at
the same time, are propositions in defence of which
men have killed one another in thousands, and prac-
tised hideous tortures upon thousands.

The need to believe is it is obvious very in-
tense. Men lack the courage to gaze into pain, evil,
death, and the deserts beyond death with their own

The Results 81

eyes ; they need to look through the safe and misty
glass of legend and dogma. The human mind, like a
creeping plant, demands a support to which it may
cling and upon which it may grow, and, finding it,
embraces it with fierce intensity. The discomfort
occasioned by the absence of such a support is none
the less keen because its source is seldom realised.

Now the age in which we live is peculiar in that the
supports it offers are not such as to sustain the weight
of the contemporary mind. Coming to us from the
remote past, they are simple in structure, unsure in
their foundations, and unadapted to the complexities
of the modern intellect. Thus the mind searches in
vain for a substratum of what can be taken for
granted upon which to rest. Not strong enough as
yet to stand alone, it tends, unsupported, to give way
under the strain. It is not altogether in irony that
suicides are called "temporarily insane."

In the second place, scepticism about the universe
leads to the adoption of a way of life which is apt to
be found unsatisfying. Where everything is uncer-
tain, the doctrine of let us eat and drink, for to-
morrow we die, at once concrete and definite, is
eagerly embraced. The future being unknown, it is
the part of wisdom to make the most of the present
that we know. At the same time, moral considera-
tions, deprived of their supernatural backing, lose
their accustomed force. We should be good, we used
to be told, because goodness is pleasing to God. He
loves an upright man ; He also likes him to be tem-
perate and continent. Once the practice of virtue is
identified with pleasing God, it becomes difficult to
ignore the respective consequences of His pleasure
and His displeasure. Most religions have taken care
to paint these consequences in the liveliest colours,
with the result that it is difficult to say how much so-
called virtuous conduct has been prompted by the
desire to achieve an eternity of celestial bliss, and to
avoid an eternity of infernal torment.
FR

82 The Present and Future of Religion

It is notorious to-day that heavenly rewards no
longer attract and infernal punishments no longer
deter with their pristine force ; young people are
frankly derisive of both, and, seeing no prospect of
divine compensation in the next world for the wine
and kisses that morality bids them eschew in this one,
take more or less unanimously to the wine and kisses.
Unfortunately the pleasurable results anticipated
from these sources fail to materialise. That un-
checked indulgence in the more obvious types of
pleasure is unsatisfying is the unanimous teaching of
those who have had the leisure and opportunity to
try them in all the ages. It is the more unfortunate
that it is a truth which nobody believes to be true,
until he has discovered it for himself, and there are
some who in making the discovery fall out in dis-
illusion and disgust.

Thus the religious indifference which determines
the attitude to life of young people issues in a practical
Epicureanism, which finds in "Let us eat and drink,
for to-morrow we die" the only acceptable guide to
conduct. Such an attitude, whatever it may mean for
a mature sage, involves for the youth of the twentieth
century a contemptuous abandonment of those in-
hibitions and restraints which the nineteenth century
complacently termed its "morals." Now, I do not
wish to uphold Victorian morals ; on the contrary, I
think them stupid, cruel, and narrow, and the lives of
those who were governed by them were thwarted and
exasperated lives. But it is part of my contention that
man has not yet evolved at a level at which he can
successfully conduct his life without some canons
of conduct to which his moral instinct bids him
adhere, so that, even when he ignores them, he can
feel that he does so at his peril, knowing that he
might have done right when, in fact, he has done
wrong. From this point of view almost any morals at
all are better than no morals at all. A life without
morals tends to be a life without duties, and a life

The Results 83

without duties is apt to become by process of exclu-
sion a life devoted to pleasure.
Now, as I have hinted above, the search for pleasure
is exposed to one very serious drawback ; it fails to
achieve the desired result. The knowledge that pleas-
ure may not be pursued directly forms part of the
instinctive wisdom of the ages, which the modern
world has somehow missed. The kingdom of happi-
ness, like the kingdom of beauty, is not to be taken by
storm, any more than it is to be purchased with
dollars. Pursue happiness directly and you will find
that she eludes you ; but she will sometimes consent
to surprise you, when you are busy with something
else. Of this fact there is no adequate explanation.
You may say, following Schopenhauer, that life is a
restless, ever-changing urge, expressing itself in a con-
tinual series of needs and wants. Wanting is a pain,
and provokes the individual to take steps to satisfy
the want. Satisfaction brings pleasure, but only for a
moment, since the old want is immediately succeeded
by a new one. Now, since satisfaction consists merely
in deliverance from the pain of need, and since, when
it is satisfied, the need ceases, it is clear that the pleas-
ure of satisfaction can only be momentary. Pleasure,
in other words, is relative and dependent upon a pre-
ceding need, and does not outlive the need whose
satisfaction it attends. Hence those who seek to live a
life of pleasure make a double mistake ; they endeav-
our to obtain pleasure without undergoing the pain of
the preceding need, and they endeavour to prolong
pleasure, whose nature is fleeting, with a view to its
continued enjoyment. But in proportion as pleasures
increase, the capacity for them diminishes, since what
is customary is no longer felt as a pleasure. The pen-
alty we pay for these mistakes is restlessness, bore-
dom, and satiety. This, at least, is the gospel accord-
ing to Schopenhauer. Nor can its topical application
be doubted. Senor Federico Beltran-Masses, taxed
with painting the most sensational and sensuous

84 The Present and Future of Religion

pictures exhibited in London during the summer of
1929, is reported to have replied : "I want my pic-
tures to have a moment of electricity in them. Only
so can they express the new age. The cocktail is
necessary to the new life. People are bored and ner-
vous, and the cocktail is the only drink that stimu-
lates them. I try to express this nervousness of the
twentieth century. I want to electrify people."

Or, if you like a more picturesque explanation, you
may say that the elusiveness of pleasure is one of the
penalties of the Fall, and that, since man left Eden, it
nas been decreed that only by roundabout means and
by looking the other way shall he gain what most he
desires ; or, more picturesquely still, that God is a
practical joker, who created the world for the amuse-
ment derived from contemplating its anomalies. The
Tantalus joke is a good one, and the spectacle of
happiness being withdrawn from the clutching hands
of those who seek to grasp it does not pall even when
the play lasts through eternity. The irony is in-
creased by the behaviour of the tantalised, who,
buoyed up by the hope eternally frustrated that the
future will be better than the past, praise the Author
of their miseries and express their gratitude that He
has not made things worse.

But, whatever the explanation of the coyness of
pleasure, the fact is undeniable. It has been dis-
covered and rediscovered by successive ages, until it
has come to form one of the secular commonplaces of
worldly wisdom. The case is admirably put by one of
the characters in Mr. Aldous Huxley s exquisitely
penetrating social satire, Point Counter Point. A dis-
carded mistress, rusticating in the country, has ex-
pressed surprise that, having lost her lover, she
should yet be happy. Old Mrs. Quarles comments as
follows :

"It's because you're not trying to be happy or wondering why
you should have been made unhappy, because you've stopped
thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That's the enor-

The Results 85

mous stupidity of the young people of this generation," Mrs.
Quarles went on ; "they never think of life except in terms of
happiness. How shall I have a good time ? That's the question
they ask. Or they complain, Why am I not having a better time ?
But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word,
perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by
everybody. And, even when they get their good times, it's inevit-
ably a disappointment for imagination is always brighter than
reality. And after it's been had for a little, it becomes a bore.
Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's
happy. It's because they're on the wrong road. The question they
ought to be asking themselves isn't, Why aren't we happy, and
how shall we have a good time ? It's : How can we please God, and
why aren't we better ? If people asked themselves those questions
and answered them to the best of their ability in practice, they'd
achieve happiness without ever thinking about it. For it's not by
pursuing happiness that you find it ; it's by pursuing salvation.
And when people were wise, instead of merely clever, they
thought of life in terms of salvation and damnation, not of good
times and bad times. If you're feeling happy now, Marjorie, that's
because you've stopped wishing you were happy and started trying
to be better. Happiness is like coke something you get as a by-
product in the process of making something else."

Without some system of morals to discipline his
passions, some guiding principle in obedience to
which to conserve his energies, some channel of
endeavour along which to canalise his efforts, a man's
activities tend to become diffused, and his life pur-
poseless. He achieves nothing, and grows tired and
discouraged through lack of achievement. "The sin-
gular fact remains," said Nietzsche, "that everything
of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance,
and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed,
whether it be in thought itself or in administration,
or in speaking or persuading, in art just as in conduct,
has only developed by means of the tyranny of arbi-
trary law." "The essential thing 'in heaven
earth' is, apparently, that there should be
ence in the same direction ; there thereby rji
has always resulted in the long run, somejf
has made life worth living ; for inst
music, dancing, reason, spirituality. 91

86 The Present and Future of Religion

In most ages religion and the sense of moral obliga-
tion have provided the necessary discipline of which
Nietzsche speaks. Lacking both, the men and women
of our time find it, if they are fortunate, in work. It is
for this reason that the modern man is the hardest
worker the world has seen. He cannot afford to be
idle. For those who have no God, servitude to work
is of all forms of bondage the least, as servitude to
pleasure is the most exacting. Throw yourself body
and soul into your work, lose yourself in an interest,
devote yourself to a cause, lift yourself out of the sel-
fish little pit of vanity and desire which is the self by
giving yourself to something greater than the self,
and on looking back you will find that you have been
happy. Pursue happiness directly, and it will elude
you ; purchase it, and it will turn to dust and ashes at
your dollars 1 touch.

We must work, then, we moderns, for work's sake,
and take happiness for the wild flower that it is. To
stabilise the rainbow, to bottle the perfume, to grasp
in order to possess, this is the prime error of the age,
an error which vitiates our lives and ruins our leisure.
Happiness is not a house that can be built with
hands ; it is a flower that surprises you, a song which
you hear as you pass the heage, rising suddenly and
simply in the night, and dying down again.

For those who can work then, it seems, the case is
not so bad. But it is rarely in the modern world that a
man can chance upon employment that is more than
a monotonous routine of boring duties. It is not such
work that can endow his life with significance and
provide him with a substitute for the discipline of
morals or religion. And so he joins in the search for
pleasure.

The practical acceptance of Hedonism as a philoso-
phy of life is facilitated by the psychological develop-
ments to which I referred in the last chapter. The
belief in the efficacy of the unconscious has combined
with the disbelief in the efficacy of God to abolish

The Results 8 7

ethics. Morality is doubly suspect. The incentive to
act rightly because it is pleasing to God is removed
by scepticism as to His existence ; the incentive to act
rightly, because we ought to do good for its own sake,
is destroyed by the practical fatalism of the new psy-
chology. If a man can act only in the way in which the
strongest impulse of the moment dictates, there is no
point in telling him that he ought to act in some other
way. If we cannot act freely, we cannot act morally.
The word "ought," said Bentham, if it means any-
thing at all, ought to be excluded from the dictionary,
while the whole concept of good is divested of mean-
ing, and therefore of objective validity, by an analysis
which exhibits it as merely a rationalisation of those
of our impulses which happen to secure the approval
of other people.

The effects of this attitude upon traditional ethics
can be presented in their clearest light by considering
their bearing upon that well-known Victorian faculty,
the conscience. Conscience, once so popular and so
respected, has gone out of fashion ; it is become so
demodt that men confess to possessing it with a kind
of shame. What has happened to conscience, and why ?
To answer this question, let us see what precisely
the Victorian conscience was. The Victorians be-
lieved that the moral well-being of the soul was
guarded by a vigilant and beneficent faculty known as
the conscience. The conscience acted as a sort of
"barmaid" to the soul. Faced with the fact that hu-
man beings, being fallible, must be permitted a cer-
tain amount of rope, she would countenance up to a
point (and rather reluctantly, perhaps) the indulgence
of their desires. But only up to a point ! When that
point was reached, "Time's up, gentlemen," she
would say ; "we close at 10.30 ; no more drinking
now," 1 and proceed to close the bar. If gentlemen

1 1 am writing only of English consciences as I know them.
Another metaphor would now have to be invented to describe the
activities of the American conscience.

88 The Present and Future of Religion

continue to drink after closing hours, they get into
trouble with the law ; conscience, in other words, to
revert to nineteenth-century language, would proceed
to give them a bad time. This process was known as
suffering remorse. It was not suggested, of course,
that conscience was always successful in her inhibi-
tory activities ; she often especially if you were
wicked failed. But, even then, you had to pay a price
for her defeat ; she could always take the sugar out of
your coffee, even if she could not prevent you from
drinking it.

Now, it is clear that if the arguments indicated in the
last chapter are correct, this way of regarding the
workings of our moral interior must be given up.
Conscience herself, according to modern psychology,
is but the slave of some instinct (or the effect of some
stimulus) of whose workings we are and must remain
ignorant. If that instinct is stronger than the desire
that conscience admonishes (or the will suppresses),
then conscience (or the will) triumphs, and we are
considered to be virtuous (or persons of strong char-
acter). If not, the desire obtains its gratification, and
we are considered to be wicked (or persons of weak
character). But we are not in either case responsible
for what happens, simply because the part of our-
selves that we know and can, therefore, control is not
the part that matters.

This psychological fatalism issues in a practical
repudiation of ethics, and convicts moral effort of
futility. The state of mind so generated is, as I have
tried to show, intimately bound up with the decay of
religious belief. Moral scepticism is at once the parent
and the offspring of religious scepticism. Both issue in
a disavowal of values. Religious scepticism tells us
that we have no ground for supposing that the uni-
verse is not, as it appears to be, a pointless collocation
of atoms, in which human life travels an alien
passenger across an indifferent environment. Life,
in fact, is a casual phenomenon, thrown up by the

The Results 89

haphazard process of evolution, a process which is
itself without a goal. One day when, for example,
the heat of the sun is no longer such as to maintain
conditions suitable for living organisms upon the
earth life will disappear from the one tiny corner of
the cosmic stage upon which it has played its un-
called-for part. The universe, then, is without pur-
pose and without value ; the attempt to penetrate its
mysteries is futile, for it has none ; the desire to
apprehend its reality is doomed to disappointment,
for there is no reality other than the world we know.

Moral scepticism informs us that the object of living
is to gratify our desires. Goodness is a meaningless
expression, or, rather, it has meaning only in terms of
human desire : things are good because we approve
them ; we do not approve them because they are
good. In any event, we can only approve of what we
fike ; we cannot help what we like, and we cannot
help acting in accordance with our likings. Therefore,
even if good had some objective meaning, which it has
not, even if certain things were valuable independ-
ently of our desires, which they are not, we should not
be free to pursue them.

Both lines of thought issue in the same conclusion.
Nothing, it appears, is worth taking trouble about ;
the universe is not worshipful and no elements in it
are worshipful ; therefore there is no point in taking
trouble about that. Morality is not valuable, for there
is nothing to do but to gratify our desires, and, even
if there were, we could not do it ; therefore, there is
no point in taking trouble about that.

Tnus scepticism in matters of belief, and fatalism in
matters of conduct, go hand in hand. Together they
combine to produce the state of mind from which
spring the philosophical suicides with which the
present chapter began. This state of mind determines
the instinctive attitude to religious questions of many
young people to-day. They are not hostile to religion ;
they simply ignore it. They find the questions with

90 The Present and Future of Religion

which religion and morals deal meaningless ; to dis-
cuss them is merely boring. Stevenson says somewhere
that the only three subjects worth discussing are love,
freedom, and immortality. Living to-day, he would
find a world in which not only are freedom and im-
mortality not discussed, but in which it is not under-
stood how they ever could have been discussed. I
have been asked by students how a man of Steven-
son's good sense could say such a silly thing. As to
love, of course, the position is different.

Having in mind the writing of this book, I recently
tackled a chance gathering of a dozen young men and
women on the subjects with which it deals. Did they,
I asked, believe in God. If they did not, did they ever
feel the need of religion, and wish that they did. To
the first question they answered "No" without excep-
tion. No one had believed since he or she had grown
up. One only answered the second in the affirmative,
and the recurrence of her occasional need was re-
garded by all, including herself, as tending to the dis-
credit of religion. She felt the need of divine comfort
and guidance, she said, when she was weak, ill, or in
trouble. "Quite so ! " said the others. "That is what
religion does. Its appeal is to your weakness, not to
your strength. When you are ill or depressed, when
you are below your usual form and unable to stand up
to life, that is when it gets hold of you. That is why it
has had such a vogue among the poor and the op-
pressed, the failures and the neuropaths. God, in
short, only gets the men and women life doesn't want.
Religion is a spiritual drug for the spiritually diseased.
Healthy people do not need it." And, drawing atten-
tion to the historical importance of religion, empha-
sising the hold which it has exercised over men's
minds in the past, and expressing a doubt whether
what had been said constituted a complete account of
it in the present, I was met by frank incredulity.
Religion, it was asserted, is thought to be important
merely because it has always been thought so. Its

The Results 91

importance, in other words, is conventional, not real.
It is a legacy from humanity's past, to which men
pay the conventional respect due to unwanted be-
quests, a toy from the childhood of the race, which
adults will discard.

And so I return to the starting-point of my first
chapter religious belief is rapidly and palpably on
the decline. Young people in particular are either in-
different to religion or hostile to it. For the first time
in history there is coming to maturity a generation of
men and women who have no religion, and feel no
need for one. They are content to ignore it. Also they
are very unhappy, and the suicide rate is abnormally
high.

Part II: The Prospects of Religion

Chapter VI
WHAT RELIGION IS SUPPOSED TO BE

Chapter VI

WHAT RELIGION IS SUPPOSED TO BE
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies. BERNARD SHAW.

In Part 1. 1 have tried to give an account of the state
of religion as it is in this country to-day. From this
account two conclusions have emerged. First, organ-
ised religion as it is embodied in the creeds of the
orthodox Churches has lost its hold, and is unlikely
to regain it. Secondly, men and women have never-
theless a need of religion. This need is a fundamental
fact of our natures ; human beings have it because
they are human beings, and they will continue to
have it so long as they remain human beings. To it
the religions of the past have ministered, and to it the
religion of the present does not minister. The infer-
ence is irresistible ; those elements in our nature
which have previously found satisfaction in religion
are at present thwarted and unsatisfied. Seeking to
express themselves, they are unable to find an ade-
quate mode of expression, and, in so far as one side
of their nature fails to find an outlet, the men and
women of the twentieth century fail to grow up into
complete and fully developed human beings. They
are thwarted and repressed in respect of their religious
needs, just as their fathers and mothers were thwarted
and repressed in respect of their sex needs. To find
satisfaction they must find a religion in which they
can believe.

What, then, are the conditions with which such a
religion must comply ? This is the question with
which the second part of this book will be concerned,
and to which I shall try, however tentatively, to give
some sort of answer. Before, however, I can hope
successfully to approach it, two further questions pre-
sent themselves. First, What is religion ? Is it, for
example, a particular set of beliefs, and, if so, what
beliefs ? And secondly, How does religion arise, and

96 The Present and Future of Religion

what is the origin and nature of the need to which it
ministers ? With these two questions I propose briefly
to deal in this and the succeeding chapters. I shall
seek to show first that the set of beliefs which are
commonly regarded as constituting what is called
religion to-day are not such as to command the re-
spect of the educated mind, and, secondly, that to
locate, as many do, the origin of the religious need in
the emotions and fears of primitive man, though it
may throw some light upon the nature of that need, is
not to explain its present character as a factor in the
consciousness of civilised men and women.
First, then, What is it that religion is commonly sup-
posed to be ? Posed with this question, the ordinary
man of the world would, I think, find some little diffi-
culty in replying. As I do not want to embark upon
a discussion of the varieties of religious belief by enu-
merating the different forms which religion has as-
sumed during the history of civilisation, I shall
assume him to have been brought up in twentieth-
century England as a member of a Christian Church.
This procedure is the more legitimate, since the com-
parative study of religious beliefs has shown that the
fundamental tenets of all the great religions bear a
strong family likeness ; to all intents and purposes,
indeed, most of them are the same, which is only to be
expected, since the need from which they spring is the
same need. Returning, then, to the average member
of a twentieth-century Christian Church, I should
expect him to reply somewhat as follows: "Religion
is a belief or set of beliefs about the nature and gov-
ernment of the universe, and the status and destiny of
human life within the universe. This belief or set of
beliefs is to the effect that this earth, and all that lives
upon the earth, were created by a God who is both om-
nipotent and benevolent that is to say, both all-
powerful and all-good. In spite of His omnipotence,
He permits to us His creatures a measure of free-will,
in order that we may mould our destinies by our

What Religion is supposed to be 97

actions, and He suffers pain and evil to exist in order
that our natures may be disciplined by suffering, and
that we may learn to avoid what is bad. Because we
have not succeeded in doing this as well as might have
been expected, He has been constrained, out of His
great love for the world, to send His only Son into it,
in the guise of a man, to show people how they ought
to live, and to assure them that, if they succeeded in
living correctly i.e. believed what He told them,
repented of their past sins, and avoided future ones
they might be translated into Paradise and continue
there indefinitely in the enjoyment of God's com-
pany." It is, moreover, usually held that pain and
evil will disappear when our natures have been suffi-
ciently perfected by suffering to make us fit to enter
the celestial world i.e. the world inhabited by God
although, should we fail in the test, we shall be
doomed to suffer pain and to perform evil eternally.
In spite of this latter belief, it is also held that pain
and evil are unreal in some sense in which happiness
and goodness are real. The reason for this is that it is
not thought to be compatible with the goodness of
God that He should create pain and evil which pos-
sess any reality other than that of mere seeming ;
they are, in fact, illusions born of our finite and partial
understandings, although the understanding by
means of which we realise this truth is, presumably,
neither partial nor finite. In general it is held that life
as a whole, and human life in particular, is not mean-
ingless, but purposive, and that, although its purpose
may not be clear to us in the present, it will be re-
vealed probably in an existence of a different type in
the future.

The religious person, further, has faith. The use of
the word "faith" means, I take it, that the above pro-
positions or propositions of a similar character are
and should be based, not, like scientific theories, on
concrete factual evidence which can be brought for-
ward in their support, nor like mathematical proposi-
GR

98 The Present and Future of Religion

tions on rational arguments by means of which they
can be irrefutably aemonstrated, but on some inner
feeling or intuition which can, and in many cases
does amount to a conviction of positive certitude.
Being modern, however, we like to have evidence for
what we believe, and when we are asked to take
our beliefs on trust, that is, to have faith, we like to
think that we are committing ourselves to a view of
the universe which, though not rationally demon-
strable, is at least reasonable. What our beliefs assert
must not, that is to say, conflict with our experience,
but should rather aim at making that experience co-
herent and intelligible. To do so our beliefs must
square with the facts of existence as we know them,
and, when they go beyond the evidence, must be at least
compatible with it. Above all, they must not outrage
our intelligence. Judged by these tests, the proposi-
tions asserted by the believer in the tenets of the ortho-
dox Christian doctrine, as summarised above, seem to
be open to the following objections :

A. They require us to suppose that God is wicked,
in which case He cannot be benevolent ; or limited, in
which case He cannot be omnipotent ; or deceitful,
in which case He can be neither benevolent nor omni-
potent. This conclusion follows from a consideration
of the phenomena of pain and evil.

Two alternatives are here possible : either (i.) God
created them or (ii.) He did not.

(i.) Let us first suppose that God deliberately
created them. Then we may suppose, further, that
they are either (a) real or (b) in some sense unreal or
illusory. If (a) they are real, then the deliberate crea-
tion of pain and evil is the mark of a wicked person,
and God is not benevolent. If (b) they are unreal, we
must ask how it comes about that we believe them to
be real. That we think we suffer, and that we think
men do us evil, is undeniable. If these beliefs are
false, then, in holding them we are making a mistake.
God, aware of the fact that we are making this mis-

What Religion is supposed to be 99

take, and knowing, in virtue of His omniscience, that
we should make it, yet deliberately permits us to err.
He is, therefore, responsible for the introduction of
error into the universe. Now, the deliberate creation
of error is as incompatible with the character of a
completely good being as the deliberate creation of
pain and evil. Why, moreover, should God need to
deceive us in the matter, even if we could suppose
that He wished to do so ? Deception springs from
limitation ; we find it necessary to deceive only when
we cannot achieve our ends openly. An all-powerful
being has not the need, an all-good being has not the
wish, to deceive.

(ii.) Let us now suppose that God did not create
pain and evil. Then they must exist independently of
Him, being, on this view, distinct and separate fac-
tors or principles in the universe. If God is good, it is
clear that He cannot desire that pain and evil should
exist, and they must exist, therefore, in His despite.
Hence, if God has the wish to remove them and
cannot, it is because He is not all-powerful ; if He has
not the wish, He is not all-good.

These objections to the theory of an omnipotent,
benevolent Creator are sufficiently familiar. As a rule,
no attempt is made to answer them. It is said that the
questions involved are mysteries, which our limited
intelligences are unable to comprehend. We know
that God is good and powerful, and that is enough. If
we do know it, this answer is, of course, satisfactory ;
if not, not. In any event, the resort to faith as a substi-
tute for knowledge, not being based upon rational
grounds, is not susceptible of rational discussion.

Sometimes, however, an attempt is made to recon-
cile the existence of pain and evil with that of an all-
good God by attributing them to the activities of man.
God, it is said, out of His infinite goodness, bestowed
upon man the gift of free-will. Man has abused this
gift to create evil, and pain is the necessary accom-
paniment of evil. If we ask why man does these

ioo The Present and Future of Religion

things, the answer is, because of the Fall. But is this
answer satisfactory in the sense required ; does it,
that is to say, absolve God from responsibility ? It is
clear that man could not create pain and evil out of
nothing. They must spring from the innate disposi-
tions and potentialities of his nature. It was because
he was a creature of such a kind that he acted in such
a way. Now, these innate dispositions and potentiali-
ties in virtue of which he so acted were implanted in
him by whom ? We can only answer, by man's Cre-
ator, who is thus found to be responsible, if not for
the actual introduction of pain and evil into the
world, at least for the creation of beings with the
potentialities from which pain and evil inevitably
sprang. The reply that there was no inevitability
aoout it, that man was free to do as he chose, and that
the responsibility is therefore man's and not God's,
is evidence of our good intentions towards God, but
is otherwise not convincing. God, being omniscient,
must have known what the result of creating the hu-
man race would be. He must, that is to say, have
known that men would utilise their gift of free-will to
introduce pain and evil into the world. Therefore He
deliberately permitted the introduction of pain and
evil into a world that knew them not. In other words,
He deliberately made the experiment of creating the
human race, knowing that evil would come of it. But
this is not the conduct of an all-good being.
B. The orthodox view requires us to suppose that
God's actions are devoid both of point and purpose.
Since God created the world, we must suppose that
there was a time when the world was not ; there was
only God. God ex hypothesi is perfect ; therefore, in
the beginning there were absolute goodness and
absolute perfection. How out of this single, all-
embracing goodness pain and evil could be gener-
ated, unless the potentiality for their generation was
already present in the goodness unless, in short, the
goodness was not wholly good is a difficulty at

What Religion is supposed to be 101

which I have already glanced. Let us, however, waive
the question of how and come to the question of why.
That we are imperfect creatures, doing evil and suf-
fering pain, is unfortunately true. But we are assured
that if we behave in the manner which priests en-
join, and of which God approves, our sins will be
forgiven us, and we shall pass beyond this world of
pain and evil into an eternity of bliss.

This process, variously if vaguely described as going
to heaven, being gathered to the bosom of Abraham,
or being made one with God, implies at least this
much, that our imperfections will be shed and that
we shall become perfect. Now, let us suppose that
this consummation is ultimately achieved by all living
creatures, and that the conception of a hell in which
those of us who are unsuccessful in pleasing God
suffer torments throughout eternity is a figment, a
morbid flight of priestly imaginations seeking to re-
venge themselves upon those who have flouted cleri-
cal authority. Granting this assumption, we reach the
following position ; suffering and imperfection having
passed away, there remains only the absolute perfec-
tion of God and of those who, if still separate from
God (and on this point the Christian religion speaks
with a doubtful voice), are at least perfect, even as
God is perfect. Thus the end of the process is abso-
lute perfection ; but so also was the beginning. The
process, therefore, is circular.

What, then, it may be asked, can be the point of a
journey which, involving pain and evil and imperfec-
tion on the way, aims at reaching a goal which is none
other than the starting-point ; or of an undertaking
which, starting from perfection, deliberately gener-
ates pain and evil (or permits them to be generated)-
in order that it may achieve perfection ?
the possibility of such a process, the
tive seems insoluble. " *

Finally, it may be asked, why should
all ? He could do so only in so far as He

102 The Present and Future of Religion

and desire implies the existence of a need in respect of
that which is desired. But a perfect being cannot feel
need. For if He be good, His need can only be for
that which is good. Hence, God, if He desires, de-
sires something which is good. Now, we cannot desire
that which we already possess ; consequently, there
must be goods namely, those which God desires
which He does not already possess. Therefore the
sum-total of His goodness could be increased ; there-
fore He is not as good as possible ; therefore He is not
perfect. For these reasons it seems impossible to re-
concile the creation of the world by an omnipotent,
benevolent Creator with his possession both of omni-
potence and of benevolence. These objections apply
to the orthodox theological view in so far as it seeks to
provide an account of the phenomena of existence.

It seems to me to be further objectionable on moral
grounds, as (i) destroying the possibility of ethics and
(2) impugning the reality of free-will. Since, more-
over, the moral sense and our consciousness of free-
dom are also facts in the universe which must be
accounted for in any comprehensive attempt to ex-

Elain the world as we find it, we may say that its
ulure adequately to provide for them constitutes a
further objection to the orthodox view in so far as it
purports to be true, apart from its deleterious effect
upon morality and its discouragement of human effort,
(i.) An omnipotent, benevolent God will do only
what is good and will what is good. To do good is,
therefore, the same as to do God's will. Once this
identification is established, it is impossible to forget
it. With the consciousness of God's vigilance ever
present to us, we cannot but remember that in doing
good we are pleasing God, in doing evil displeasing
Him. Now, all religions, as I have already pointed
out, have dwelt upon the respective consequences of
pleasing and displeasing God with great emphasis,
the more advanced religions representing an eternity
of absolute bliss as the reward of the one, and of

What Religion is supposed to be 103

physical torture as the punishment of the other. Thus
the injunction to act in accordance with God's will
becomes in practice an exhortation not to piety, but
to prudence. In practice religion has offerea us a
choice between two kinds of insurance policy. The
one is a short-term insurance policy ; the premiums
are negligible and the benefits are reaped in this life ;
they are unlimited freedom to gratify our desires and
to enjoy what is called a " good time." The other is a
long-term policy ; the premiums are paid in the form
of self-denial and mortification of the flesh in the
present, and the policy is drawn in an eternity of
heavenly bliss in the hereafter. Now, directly consid-
erations of this kind are allowed to influence conduct,
whether the influence is unconscious or avowed, it is
idle to pretend that it is dictated by ethical motives.
If we do good because it is God's will, a will of whose
power we are only too conscious, and to the dangers
of thwarting which we are kept fully alive, it is clear
that we do not do good for its own sake ; we do not do
it, in other words, because it is good. Yet the possi-
bility of ethics depends upon our ability to prefer
good to evil uninfluenced by any other consideration.

(ii.) If God is omniscient, He knows everything ;
therefore, He knows the future. He knows, therefore,
what is going to happen, and, as He cannot make a
mistake, the future is determined because of God's
knowledge of it. Therefore we are not free to make
the future as we please ; we are not even free to do
this or to do that here and now, since, as God knows
which of the two we are going to do, our choice be-
tween them is already determined.

If the ethical implications of the orthodox view are
such as I have indicated, then we shall be averse from
embracing it, except under the strongest compulsion
from the arguments in its favour. Yet, when assessed
in respect of its ability to give a rational account of
the universe, it is, as I have tried to show, riddled
with contradictions. Judged by the tests suggested

104 The Present and Future of Religion

above, it does not make our experience intelligible, it
does not explain the facts of existence as we know
them, it does not square with such evidence as is avail-
able, and, so far from satisfying, it offends our intelli-
gence and is repugnant to our moral sense. It seems
to follow that, if religion is to be identified with the
set of beliefs which I have tried to analyse, it cannot
satisfy the conditions indicated at the beginning of
the chapter, and it cannot hope to claim the allegiance
of the educated mind.

The conclusion is unavoidable ; if the acceptance of
this or an equivalent set of beliefs is all that we mean
by the word religion, then the future must be one
without religion. But is it ? Before we can answer we
must turn to the second question with which we began
this chapter : "How does religion arise, and what is
the origin and nature of the need to which it ap-
peals ?" The answer to this question demands a chap-
ter to itself.

Chapter VII

HOW RELIGION AROSE, AND WHY IT
FLOURISHED

Chapter VII

HOW RELIGION AROSE, AND WHY IT FLOURISHED
An honest God is the noblest work of man. ANON.

At the end of the last chapter, in discussing the need
for religion, I used the words "origin and nature"
deliberately, because the conjunction of these two
words seems to me to mask a fallacy which it is im-
portant to bring to light. The fallacy is to assume
that to lay bare the origins of a thing is tantamount
to describing its present nature.

That this is very far from being the case, I shall try
in the next chapter to show ; yet we more often as-
sume that it is, especially if we are of a scientific turn,
than we are commonly aware, and the assumption is
nowhere more prevalent than in regard to religion.
By most of us, indeed, it is not even realised that an
assumption is involved. We take it for granted that to
demonstrate that religion began as witchcraft, totem-
ism, or exogamy, is to prove that it is in essence no
more than witchcraft, totemism, and exogamy now,
although we should never dream of asserting that the
fact that the savage can only count on the fingers of
one hand, coupled with the demonstration that arith-
metic began with and developed from such counting,
invalidates the multiplication table. To show how a
belief arises is not to describe, still less to discredit it,
and, unless we are to deny to religion the kind of
growth which we are prepared to concede to other
expressions of the human spirit, it is obvious that
there must be more in the religious consciousness
to-day than in the savage fears and flatteries from
which it may be shown to have arisen. And, if there
is, it will be for just that "more" that an account of
religion in terms of its origin and history will fail to
make provision. The point is of importance because
the interpretation of religion in terms of its origin is
often used to prove that religion is not a permanent

io8 The Present and Future of Religion

and necessary need of the human spirit ; savage in
inception, it will, it is urged, disappear when we have
finally left our savagery behind us. Religion, it is often
said, belongs to the childhood of the race, and will
one day be outgrown, together with war and other
savage habits, such as the habit of imprisoning men
for punishment and animals for show, or the habit of
decking the bodies of women with fragments of stone,
lumps of metal, and portions of dead birds.

For myself, I do not hold this view, and I shall try
in the next chapter to show the fallacy latent in the
mode of reasoning upon which it rests. For the pres-
ent, let us see what the explanations of religions in
terms of origin involve.

They are advanced chiefly by anthropologists, who
visit remote Melanesian islands for the purpose of
observing the religious practices of the natives. Re-
cording them, they conclude that primitive religion
is the offspring of human fear and human conceit ; it
springs from the desire to propitiate the alien forces
of nature, to invest human life with significance in
face of the vast indifference of the universe, and to
secure the support of an immensely powerful and
ferocious personage for the individual, the tribe, or
the nation. This general attitude to religion, by as-
cribing it to a subjective need of human nature, robs
it of objective validity. Religion, if this account is cor-
rect, is not a revelation of reality, but a symptom of a
state of mind ; it is an expression of what man is like.
To say that there is God is not to say anything more
than that we need to think that there is, and the need
is in no sense a guarantee of the existence of that which
satisfies it. Thus the great religions of the world are not
theology, but psychology; witnesses, not to the attri-
butes of God, but to the inventive faculty of man. God
is not a real being ; He is the image of man, projected,
enlarged, upon the empty canvas of the universe.

This view of religion as subjective expresses itself in
different forms, according to the nature of the primi-

Haw Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 109

live feelings upon which it lays stress. I will take
three as examples.

(i) The argument from man's feeling of loneliness
and insecurity may be summarised as follows : Hu-
man life is immensely insignificant. It is an accidental
development of matter, the chance product of forces,
an accident unplanned and unforeseen in the history
of the planet. A casual and unwanted passenger, it
struggles across a fundamentally alien and hostile en-
vironment, in which the material and the brutal on all
sides condition and determine the spiritual and the
vital. One day it will finish its pointless journey with
as little noise and significance as, in the person of the
amoeba, it began it. Until this consummation occurs,
man will fare naked and forlorn through an indiffer-
ent universe, a puppet twitched into love and war
by an indifferent showman who pulls the strings.
His destiny is swayed by an inescapable fate ; his for-
tunes are at the mercy of an irresponsible chance. He
is a mere target for the shafts of doom.

These things we know, yet the knowledge is intoler-
able to us. We cannot bear to be without significance
in the universe ; we long to feel that we count, that
somehow and to something we matter. And so we
invent an immensely powerful and important person-
age called God, to whom we matter enormously.

By making ourselves important to a person who is
Himself so enormously important, we achieve the
desired significance, and the more powerful God is
conceived to be, the more significant do we, His chief
concern, become. So tremendously does He care
about us that He has made the material universe
for our benefit, this world rightly regarded being
merely a school for human nature, in which it is
trained and educated for life elsewhere ; while by
making Him in our own image we secure His special
interest in the human race. The creation of the brute
beasts to sustain our bodies and obey our orders is a
token of that interest.

no The Present and Future of Religion

Interested as he is in the human species as a whole,
he is quite specially interested in the particular race,
nation or tribe to which we happen to belong ; so that,
whatever the quarrel upon which the nation or tribe
may happen to be engaged, it may rest assured of his
support, since he is guaranteed to take the same view
of the rights and wrongs of it as we do ourselves.

Among polytheistic peoples this concept causes no
difficulty ; each has its own deity or set of deities, and
the strongest gods win. But where there is one God,
and only one, who sustains the worship and is the re-
pository of the prayers of opposed nations, the zeal of
His adherents tends to place the Almighty in a
dilemma.

To God the embattled nations sing and shout,
"God strafe England" and "God save the King,"

God this, God that and God the other thing.
"Good God 1" said God, "I've got my work cut out."

But it is easy to provide for God's solution of the
difficulty by invoking His omnipotence.

Interested in the nation or tribe to which we happen
to belong, He is quite specially interested in our-
selves; interested in and favourable towards, assisting
us against those who seek to humiliate us, and
generally discomfiting our enemies. This is a
world in which the good man is notoriously op-
pressed, while the wicked flourish like a green bay-
tree. The arrangement offends our sense of justice,
and, what is more, since we are good men ourselves,
it is unfair to us personally. Very well, then, we invent
another world in which tne good man flourishes eter-
nally and the bad one is eternally punished. Thus the
fundamental tightness of things is vindicated, and we
incidentally benefit in the process.

But in order that the system may work, it is neces-
sary that the good man and the bad man should be
under continual observation, that neither the un-
requited goodness of the one nor the unchastised

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished in

badness of the other may go unregistered. This func-
tion is admirably performed by the vertical or up-
stairs God. Thoughtfully accommodated with an
abode in the skies, a position admirably adapted for
purposes of espionage, He keeps a dossier of each
individual, recognising in us the worth that others
unaccountably fail to recognise, and observing the
wickedness and hypocrisy of those whom the world
equally unaccountably exalts. These things are care-
fully noted, and in the next world all is made right.
Immensely important, admired and envied for are
we not the favoured children of Omnipotence ? we
live happily ever afterwards ; scorned and hated, our
enemies are convincingly humiliated. Assuredly an
admirable arrangement ! It is difficult to see how it
could be improved upon. But God is essential to its
proper working, and God flourishes accordingly.

God, then, on this view, is at once the product of
human terror and the prop of human pride. He com-
forts our wretchedness, calms our fears, gives us an
assurance of justice, and makes us feel important.
"Religious ideas, " says Freud, "have sprung from
the same need as all the other achievements of cul-
ture ; from the necessity for defending oneself against
the crushing supremacy of nature/'

(2) But though Freud recognises one of the sources
01 religion in man's subjection to the forces of nature,
he finds its chief root in his relationship to society.
Hence his main account of the origin of religion is
rather different from that just summarised.

This account will be found in Freud's book, The
Future of an Illusion, which appeared in 1928. It is
not very original, but it is typical of a certain attitude
to religion, and may be taken as fairly representative
of the view of many educated people, especially psy-
chological and scientific workers to-day. Freud pro-
ceeds upon the basis of what is, in effect, a social
contract theory of the origin of society. This theory
is admirably stated early in the second book of Plato's

H2 The Present and Future of Religion

Republic. Essential to it is the conception of primitive
man as a completely non-moral animal ; as such his
natural inclination is to get his own way at all costs,
without thought of the consequences to his neigh-
bours. If his neighbour annoys him, he knocks him
on the head ; if his neighbour's wife attracts him, he
makes off with her. Thus every man has, as Glaucon
puts it in the Republic, a natural tendency to do in-
justice to his fellows. Admirable in theory, this
system, or lack of system, has one serious drawback
in practice ; the right of every man to do injustice to
his neighbours carries with it a corresponding right
on the part of his neighbours to do injustice to him.
He is one, but his neighbours are many, with the re-
sult that, where his hand is against every man and
every man's hand is against him, he tends to get the
worst of the bargain. His existence is intolerably in-
secure, he must be perpetually on his guard, and he
has no secure enjoyment of his possessions. In the
days before society was formed man's life, as the
philosopher Hobbes puts it, was "nasty, brutish, and
short." Finding the situation intolerable, men ended
it by making a compact known as the social contract.
The compact was to form society. Consenting to live
in society, man surrendered his natural right to do
what he pleased to his fellows, on condition that they
made a similar concession as regards himself. Social
relations were regulated by public opinion, which
later crystallised into law, and man for the future re-
strained his natural instincts lest he incur the social
displeasure of his fellows. Thus was society formed,
and from its formation springs the system of inhibi-
tions and restraints which men call morality. To act
morally is thus, as we have seen in chapter iv., 1 the
reverse of acting naturally and implies a victory over
the "natural man" ; we obey the law, and keep our
hands off our neighbour's wife and property, not be-
cause we are by nature moral, but in fear of the penal -
1 See pp. 62, 63.

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 113

ties with which society has proscribed actions which
violate the contract upon which it was formed. In
other words, we do right only through fear of the
consequences of doing wrong. Remove this fear of
consequences, as, for example, by endowing the
individual with the gift of invisibility at will, and the
social man would immediately relapse into the natural
man, with the result that no property would be safe,
no wife inviolable. The conclusion is that morality,
which is simply the habit of acting in a manner of
which other people approve, is not natural to man ;
on the contrary, it runs counter to his natural inter-
ests, frustrates his natural desires, and requires him
to surrender his natural rights.

Now, man is not born social. He only becomes so at
the cost of suffering and repression. Every child is
born "natural/' endowed with an egotism that bids
him tyrranise over his world. Seeking to impose his
imperious will upon his environment, he is surprised
when his environment fails to respond, pained when
it begins to resent. For a creature who starts with this
"natural" endowment the business of growing up
into a social adult who knows the lawful limits that
must be set upon his desires is, it is obvious, a for-
midable one, so formidable that, according to Freud,
it is seldom more than partially achieved, and never
achieved without suffering and injury. To assist him
in the difficult process of social adjustment the in-
dividual invokes the aid of religion. Hence the essence
of religion, according to Freud, is compensation. It is
compensation for man's loneliness in lace of the vast
indifference of the universe ; it is also, and more im-
portantly, compensation for the renunciations which
he must undertake at the bidding of society.

Wherein [asks Freud] lies the peculiar virtue of religious ideas ?
We have spoken of the hostility to culture produced by the pres-
sure it exercises and the instinctual renunciations that it demands.
If one imagined its prohibitions removed, then one could choose
any woman who took one's fancy as one's sexual object, one
HR

U4 The Present and Future of Religion

could kill without hesitation one's rival or whoever interfered
with one in any other way, and one could seize what one
wanted of another man's goods without asking his leave : how
splendid, what a succession of delights life would be 1

Forgo these delights, we must, if we are to achieve
civilisation. And, forgoing them, we demand that
the gods shall reward us for our sacrifice. Hence
religion is the force that reconciles man to the burden
of civilisation. It is the most important of the compen-
sations that civilisation offers to its citizens ; so im-
portant that only by offering it does civilisation be-
come possible. When we have learned as by second
nature to refrain from incest, murder, torture, and
arson, when we "pass right along the car, please,"
adjust our dress before leaving, and take our places at
the end of the queue, without thinking whether we
want to do these things or not, the external restric-
tions which society imposes have become instinctive
habits, the primitive child has become the civilised
adult, and social adjustment has been achieved. But
achieved only by the aid of religion. Had we no God
to whom to turn for comfort and consolation, to
whom to tell the unfulfilled wishes and thwarted
ambitions, to whom to pray for fortitude to suffer and
strength to forbear, the task would be too great for us.
With the very dawn of consciousness, the need for a
father confessor makes itself felt.

Thus little by little I became conscious where I was, and to
have a wish to express my wishes to those who could content
them ; and I could not ; for the wishes were within me and they
without ; nor could they, by any sense of theirs, enter within my
spirit.

Thus St. Augustine, who proceeds to tell how he
sought and found in God the confidant whom the
world denied.

Nor is it only from others that we need a refuge.
There is the riot of our desires, there are the prickings

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 115

of our consciences ; there is the sting of remorse.
For, though manhood is achieved, the adjustment to
society is not yet complete ; still, though with de-
creasing vigour as the individual grows older and
society more civilised, the natural man raises his head
and rebels. When the rebellion comes into the open,
when we refuse to pass down the car, take the head of
the queue, or insist upon our inalienable privilege of
driving upon the right-hand side of the road, society
has little difficulty in quelling us. There are police-
men, there are law courts, there are prisons, there are
even scaffolds. But sometimes the rebellion stays un-
derground, or, though it comes to the surface, goes
undetected.

Against these hidden revolts society must protect
itself, and evolves accordingly a system of espionage.
There is a spy within the individual citadel itself, a
spy in the service of society. This is our old Victor-
ian acquaintance, the conscience, the policeman of
society, stationed within the individual to see that
social interests are duly observed. Directly we go
wrong, directly, that is to say, we cease to act in a way
of which society approves, conscience begins to nag.
Like a dog that does not stop us from passing, but
that we cannot prevent from barking, conscience
voices the disapproval of society. The voice of con-
science is an unpleasant one, causing us grave dis-
comfort, and in extreme cases driving us to madness.
Some refuge from the stings of conscience we must
find, and we duly find it in religion. Stricken by re-
morse, we demand that our sins be forgiven us. Who
can forgive sin but God ? Fouled by our sins of
wrong-doing, we demand to be made clean. How can
we be cleansed save by bathing in the blood of Jesus ?
And so we come to a new function of religion, a new
use for God. Again religion takes the form of an in-
surance. We deny ourselves the minor luxuries, ab-
stain from the grosser forms of vice, and submit to a
little boredom on Sunday, and in return we are

u6 The Present and Future of Religion

guaranteed against discomfort from the stings of
conscience in the present and possible discomfort at
the hands of the Almighty in the hereafter.

In all these ways and in many others religion seeks
to compensate us for the strain and stress of living in
society.

Freud traces the gradual evolution of religion to per-
form this function and the success with which it has,
in fact, performed it. He distinguishes various stages
in the growth of religion, determined by the nature of
the need which at each successive stage it has been
chiefly invoked to satisfy. Initially, the chief use of the
gods is to protect man from the capriciousness of
nature ; but, as man progressed, the discoveries of
science introduced order into disorder, and substi-
tuted law for caprice. At the same time, the growing
complexity of civilisation increases the strain of social
adjustment. Less needed in the physical world, God
becomes an indispensable refuge for the harassed soul
of man. Thus history records a decline in the physi-
cal and a growth in the moral attributes of the gods.

In the course of time the first observations of law and order in
natural phenomena are made, and therewith the forces of nature
lose their human traits. But men's helplessness remains, and with

it their father-longing and the gods And the more autonomous

nature becomes and the more the gods withdraw from her, the
more earnestly are all expectations concentrated on the third task
assigned to them and the more does morality become their real
domain. It now becomes the business of the gods to adjust the
defects and evils of culture, to attend to the sufferings that men
inflict on each other in their communal life, and to see that the
laws of culture, which men obey so ill, are carried out. The laws
of culture themselves are claimed to be of divine origin, they are
elevated to a position above human society, and they are extended
over nature and the universe.

Thus Freud records the progress of religion, and
summarises the different functions which it performs.
Nor is his account singular. On the contrary, it is one
to which, with minor modifications, most psycholo-

How Religion Arose > and why it Flourished 117

gists and anthropologists would subscribe. The more
we learn about our mental, the more we learn about
our bodily natures, the more, it is said, do we lay bare
the roots of religion in the fundamental needs of our
natures. Psychologists derive the doctrine of original
sin from the sense of man's impotence in the face of
chance and destiny, physiologists from the transgres-
sions of his passionate body against the taboos of
society. From our infancy we walk between a fear and
a fear, between ruthless Nature and restricting cul-
ture, crying, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, "What shall I do
to be saved ?" And, demanding salvation at all costs,
we create God to save us.

Thus religion is the consolation of mankind, and as
such its appeal is universal.

(3) But we now come to a more limited, but scarcely
less important, function which religion has played in
the history of man. To its successful performance of
this function its growth and vigour in more modern
times is mainly attributable.

There are evils which are the common heritage of all
men ; they are death, disease, the ingratitude of man
to man, the malevolence of destiny. These are no
respecters of persons, and bear with impartial severity
upon us all. But there are others which do not belong
to the essential conditions of human life, but are inci-
dental to the way in which man has chosen collec-
tively to organise his life. For men, equal in the eyes
of God, are far from equal in the eyes of society.
There are, and always have been, rulers and ruled,
oppressors and oppressed, rich and poor ; according
to many authorities, there always will be. Society,
moreover, is based upon force, which its rulers em-
ploy to maintain and perpetuate the inequalities on
which they thrive. To make their task easier they in-
voke the assistance of religion. For religion is not
only a means of reconciling the individual to society ;
it is also, and more particularly, a device for inducing
the poor and oppressed to tolerate the particular

n8 The Present and Future of Religion

order of society which impoverishes and oppresses
them. Thus religion becomes the instrument of the
rich and the bridle of the poor. How is the oracle
worked ?

It is significant, in the first place, that most religions
extol the virtues appropriate to slaves namely,
meekness, humility, unselfishness, and contentment,
and censure as the vices of pride and presumption
the virtues of courage, originality, and independence,
and that passionate resentment at injustice and wrong
which are characteristic of those who aspire to rise
above their servitude. The Christian religion goes
further, and makes a virtue of poverty. It is only, we
are assured, with the greatest difficulty that the rich
man shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which opens
its gates to the humble and needy. Poverty and in-
significance are not, therefore, as they appear to be,
and as the world insists on regarding them, disabili-
ties to be avoided at all costs ; they are passports to
celestial bliss. As such they are rightly to fee wel-
comed. The Christian religion, indeed, expressly
encourages us to cultivate them, exhorting us to
worldly improvidence and inertia by bidding us take
no thought for the morrow and to be content with
that state of life into which it has pleased God to
call us.

As it has pleased Him to call ninety-nine out of
every hundred of us to an extremely lowly state,
religion, in so far as it is taken seriously, assists in
keeping us where we are. Assists whom ? Those who
benefit by our remaining where we are namely, our
rulers. For the governing classes have been quick to
seize the chance religion has offered them of not only
subduing their inferiors, but of representing their
subjection as a positive asset to their subjects. Ever
since an early governing-class realist slipped the par-
able about Lazarus into the text of the Gospel of
St. Luke, the priest and the parson, seeking to per-
suade the poor that it was only by remaining poor

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 119

that they would go to heaven, have been able to pro-
duce good scriptural backing for their propaganda.
The poor, on the whole, have been only too ready to
agree, and have gladly embraced the promise of celes-
tial bliss in the next world as a compensation for the
champagne and cigars they were missing in this one.
Since the celestial bliss was known to be of indefinite
continuance, while the champagne and cigars could
not last at most for more than a beggarly fifty years
(as a matter of fact, they often lasted less, God having
from time to time seen fit to punish the excesses of
the worldly by dulling their palates and depriving
them of their appetites in the present as an earnest of
His intentions for the future 1 ), the poor it is obvious
have the best of the bargain. If it has ever occurred
to them to wonder why the rich and powerful should
recklessly jeopardise the chances which they have so
freely proffered and warmly recommended to their
poorer brethren, they may possibly have comforted
themselves with the reflection that quern deus vult
perdere prius dementit. Possibly, but not probably,
for, on the whole, the poor and oppressed have been
too much engaged with their poverty and oppression
to reflect upon the motives of their betters.

Religion, from this point of view, is a gigantic social
hoax, a hoax which has been, on the whole, remark-
ably successful, so much so, indeed, that from time
to time one or another of the rulers of mankind,
franker or more secure than the rest, has not scrupled
to show how the trick was worked. Thus Napoleon,
a notorious sceptic, taxed with the protection which
he afforded to a religion in which he did not believe,
and stoutly refusing to be drawn into anti-Christian
or anti-clerical legislation :

"What is it," he asked his critics, "that makes the poor man think
it quite natural that there are fires in my palace while he is dying

1 More recently, of course, He has added cancer to the list of
penalties.

120 The Present and Future of Religion

of cold ? that I have ten coats in my wardrobe while he goes
naked ? that at each of my meals enough is served to feed his
family for a week ? It is simply religion, which tells him that in
another life I shall be only his equal, and that he actually has more
chance of being happy there than I. Yes, we must see to it that the
floors of the churches are open to all, and that it does not cost the
poor man much to have prayers said on his tomb."

Napol6on was right. The poor have a need for relig-
ion which the rich do not feel, and it is not surprising,
therefore, to find that, while scepticism and atheism
have on occasion flourished among the rich, religion
has uniformly been embraced with eagerness by the
poor. The growth of disbelief in governing-class
circles, while it may have evoked the censure of
society the rich have always thought it prudent to
keep up religious observances has rarely called down
the penalties of the law. Thus governing-class writers
of the eighteenth century, Gibbon, Voltaire, or the
Encyclopaedists, for example, who were notoriously
irreligious or hostile to religion, went comparatively
scatheless. Naturally, since they wrote for the edu-
cated upper, not for the ignorant lower, classes. Most
of the early rationalists, again, were academic people
whose books were too difficult or too dull to com-
mand a popular circulation. Excepting Woolston,
they escaped unpunished. But Peter Annett, a school-
master who tried to popularise free thought and held
forth on the village green, was sentenced to the pil-
lory and hard labour in 1763. "If we take the cases in
which the civil authorities have intervened to repress
the publication of unorthodox opinions during the
last two centuries," says Professor Bury, "we find
that the object has always been to prevent the spread
of free thought among the masses." 1

On the whole, however, the governing classes have
thought it wiser themselves to profess allegiance to
the religion which they cultivated for the benefit of
others. Nor has the profession been always insincere.
, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 222.

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 121

Using religion as an instrument, they have neverthe-
less revered it.

In the nineteenth century, as the danger to society
from the new proletariat first made itself felt, the be-
liefs of the governing classes, it is interesting to note,
become more pronounced as their religious example
becomes more edifying. It was most important that
the wage slaves of the industrial revolution should
learn to know God, and in knowing Him to respect
their betters. Their betters, then, should show them
the way. This they proceeded to do.

The Annual Register for 1798 remarks :

It was a wonder to the lower orders throughout all parts of Eng-
land to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages. This
novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire
what was the matter.

Soon afterwards Wilberforce managed to get the first
day of meeting of the House of Commons put off to
Tuesday, lest the re-assembling of Parliament on a
Monday might cause members to travel and to be
seen travelling through London on a Sunday. For the
same reason the opening of the Newmarket Races
was changed from Easter Monday to Tuesday. "In
the old times the villages on the route used to turn
out on Easter Sunday to admire the procession of rich
revellers, and their gay colours and equipment. The
Duke of York, in answer to remonstrances, said that
it was true he travelled to the races on a Sunday, but
he always had a Bible and a Prayer Book in his
carriage/'

The moral of all this is sufficiently obvious. It was,
indeed, put succinctly enough by one Arthur Young,
who, in An Enquiry into the State of Mind Among
the Lower Classes, written in 1798, says :

A stranger would think our churches were built, as indeed they
are, only for the rich. Under such arrangement where are the
lower classes to hear the Word of God, that Gospel which in our
Saviour's time was preached more particularly to the poor ?

122 The Present and Future of Religion

Where are they to learn the doctrines of that truly excellent reli-
gion which exhorts to content and to submission to the higher
powers ? . . .

Twenty years later, one Englishman out of seven being at that
time a pauper, Parliament voted a million of public money for
the construction of churches to preach submission to the higher
powers. In the debates in the House of Lords, in May 1818,
Lord Liverpool laid stress on the social importance of guiding
by this means the opinions of those who were beginning to
receive education. 1

That the position remains radically unaltered is
shown by the following dialogue between Cusins and
Undershaft from Shaw's Major Barbara, a dialogue
which has become a classic.

Cusins (in a white fury) : Do I understand you to imply that you
can buy Barbara ?

Undershaft : No ; but I can buy the Salvation Army.

Cusins : Quite impossible.

Undershaft : You shall see. All religious organisations exist by
selling themselves to the rich.

Cusins : Not the Army. That is the Church of the poor.

Undershaft : All the more reason for buying it.

Cusins : I don't think you quite know what the Army does for the
poor.

Undershaft : Oh yes, I do. It draws their teeth: that is enough for
me as a man of business

Cusins : Nonsense ! It makes them sober-

Undershaft : I prefer sober workmen. The profits are larger.

Cusins : honest

Undershaft : Honest workmen are the most economical.

Cusins : attached to their homes

Undershaft : So much the better : they will put up with anything
sooner than change their shop.

Cusins : happy

Undershaft : An invaluable safeguard against revolution.

Cusins : unselfish

Undershaft : Indifferent to their own interests, which suits me
exactly.

Cusins : with their thoughts on heavenly things

Undershaft (rising) : And not on Trade Unionism nor Socialism.
Excellent.

Cusins (revolted) : You really are an infernal old rascal.

1 J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer, 1760-1832,
pp. 234, 235.

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 123

Summing up, we may note that this conception of
the special function of religion as the instrument of
the rich and the bridle of the poor follows logically
from its main social function considered above. I
have already summarised Freud's account of religion
as man's compensation for the renunciations which
society demands of him. This may be described as
the general social function of religion. It is the part
which religion has been called upon to play in the
lives of tribal and civilised men, because they live in
tribes and societies. But in addition to the general
there is a special social function of religion, which is
to render the inequalities of society tolerable to the
masses. Civilisation, requiring of the many poor far
greater instinctive renunciations than it demands of
the rich, has given them far fewer material compensa-
tions. It is essential, therefore, if they are to acquiesce
in a state of society which on the material side de-
mands so much while giving so little, that they should
receive some compensation of the spirit, a compensa-
tion which brings comfort in the present and gives
hope for the future. Such compensation is afforded by
an ingeniously devised and richly satisfying religious
system, which, while making a virtue of humility,
feeds the fires of self-esteem, lest, revolting against
their insignificance, the poor and the many should
turn against society and destroy it. This, then, is one
of the functions which religion, and especially the
Christian religion, has performed in civilised socie-
ties ; it has taken the revolutionary sting from poverty
and blunted the edge of present discontent with
promises of future well-being. Performing this func-
tion, religion has been sedulously exploited and used
by the rich as an instrument of class domination.
God, it has been found, is cheaper than a living wage.
Very well, then, let us invest in Him ! Religion is a
show to keep the poor amused. Very well, then, let us
build churches in the slums ! For this reason Social-
ists have tended to be hostile to religion, and the Bol-

124 The Present and Future of Religion

shevik Government veers between reluctant tolera-
tion and covert persecution.

In this chapter I have endeavoured briefly to sum-
marise a number of different accounts of the origin,
the growth, and the function of religion. These ac-
counts dominate the modern psychological and socio-
logical treatment of the subject, which is, on the whole,
markedly hostile to religion. There are, admittedly,
differences on points of detail and different writers put
the emphasis differently according to the purposes
which their account is intended to serve and the as-
pect of religion with which it is chiefly concerned.
But all the accounts which I have summarised are in
fundamental agreement in interpreting religion on
subjectivist lines.

On this one fundamental point they concur. When
faced with the question, "Why is there religion ?"
they answer unanimously, "Because man wants it."
When asked, "Whence does religion rise ?" their
reply is, "From the needs of man's nature." Pressed
for an explanation of its authority and appeal, they
represent it as a "rationalisation of his instinctive
wishes." Thus all these accounts are in their different
ways subjectivist. They affirm that religion enables
man to accommodate himself to this world, that it
expresses a human need, and that it is, therefore,
pleasant and consoling ; they do not say that it repre-
sents an objective fact, that it points forward to a
different world, and that it is therefore true. With
most of what they assert I am largely, if not entirely,
in agreement. I think that the interpretations they
give of the origin of religion in terms of the needs
which it fulfils, and of the ground of its appeal in
terms of the wishes that it rationalises, are in the
main true. But I do not think that they are complete.
They are, that is to say, interpretations in terms of
origin only, and they take no account of the concep-
tion of end or purpose. They ask how religion began
and why it flourished ; they do not ask what it may

How Religion Arose, and why it Flourished 125

become. Both conceptions are, I am convinced, neces-
sary to an adequate description of the status of relig-
ion in the present, and a reasoned estimate of its
chance of survival in the future.

In the next chapter, then, I shall consider the rea-
sons for including in our survey an account of religion
in terms of what it may become.

Chapter VIII
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

Chapter VIII
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

The nature of man is not what he is born as, but what he is born
for. ARISTOTLE.

I

To the modern criticism of religion which I briefly
outlined in the last chapter, there is one very obvious
retort. It takes the form of what is vulgarly known as
a tu quoque. If it can be shown, as the critics of relig-
ion allege, that our beliefs are the projections of our
wishes, why is it only to our religious beliefs that the
demonstration applies ? People who have believed in
the existence of God have admittedly wished to be-
lieve in the existence of God. Very well, then, so runs
the criticism, their belief reflects nothing but their
wish ; it does not mean that there is a God. But has
nobody ever wished to discredit religion ? Obviously
they have. Very well, then, the belief that religion is
merely the reflection of a subjective need and there-
fore false, reflects nothing but the wish to find it so.
It does not mean that religion is merely the reflection
of a subjective need and is therefore false. If the
point were purely a logical one, I should not press it.
To score logical points against an opponent is apt to
irritate one's reader, especially if he is an English
reader, as much as one's opponent, and the prudent
controversialist will refrain. But the point is more
than a logical one.

Modern psychologists, especially modern psycho-
analysts, are continually deriding religious beliefs on
the ground that they spring from tainted motives.
Because of these motives, they hold, the believer is
predisposed to find the evidence in favour O&&CT bq~
lief he professes ; when the evidence is
cooks it ; when it is wanting altogethere'iv^nts it/
That the religious apologist does, iiiflKW/do th
things is not doubted. The Christian
IR

130 The Present and Future of Religion

dence in connection with the argument from design
to which I referred in chapter iii., 1 is a startling wit-
ness to the dishonesty of the human mind when it is
constrained by the necessity of arriving at a foregone
conclusion.

But is the reasoning of religious apologists alone sus-
pect ? I doubt it. Modern psychologists, especially
modern psycho-analysts, often argue as if, while every-
body else's intellectual motives were tainted, they
alone are animated by the single and simple desire to
discover the truth. It never seems to occur to them
that the desire to discredit religion may be as strong
as the desire to believe in it ; the motives for thinking
it false as strong as those for thinking it true. And, if
they are as strong, then, according to the doctrine
which we are asked to accept, the arguments of the
critics of religion will own as subjective a basis, will be
the projections of as strong a set of wishes, reflections
of as marked a bias, as those of its upholders. And
not only the arguments, but also the evidence. For,
if the Christian apologist cooks the evidence to feed
his preconceived desire, so may the Christian critic.
Indeed, if the psycho-analyst is right, he must do so ;
and we have only to read the literature of psycho-
analysis on the subject to realise that he does.

Religion, Freud concludes, is derivable in part from
the CEdipus complex. So, incidentally, are most of the
other manifestations of the human spirit. The conclu-
sion once announced, the evidence is subjected to the
most intolerable strain to support it. Freud, indeed,
is as anxious to believe in the importance of sex in
early life as a saint is anxious to believe in the import-
ance of God in after-life, and, while exposing the
unconscious bias that inspires the arguments of theo-
logians, he overlooks the influence of the reverse bias
on his own.

Religious mysticism, Professor Leuba concludes, is
in the main a rationalisation of frustrated sexual de-
1 See pp. 42,43.

The Evolution of Religion 131

sires. The virgin mystics, needing a man, have found
God. Professor Leuba has written a large and care-
fully documented work called The Psychology of Reli-
gious Mysticism to illustrate and enforce his thesis.
Yet great as must be the admiration of every reader
for the patience and thoroughness with which Profes-
sor Leuba has collected, and the clarity and scholar-
ship with which he has collated the material of his
book, he cannot avoid the suspicion that certain pre-
dominant interests have governed the author's la-
bours, determining both his selection of the evidence
and his interpretation of the evidence selected. He sets
out to show that mysticism reflects the physiological
and/ or psychological condition of the mystic, and, on
the whole, his book shows it, but, in showing it, shows
also that the author wanted to show it, and is dimin-
ished in respect of its trustworthiness accordingly.

Such instances could be multiplied a hundredfold.
Again and again the critics of religion are seen to be
guilty of the same process of rationalisation in the in-
terests of their unconscious wishes as that which they
detect and criticise in its apologists; inevitably, if
they are right, since our reasons, being evolved to
enable us to invent arguments for what we instinct-
ively want to do and justifications for what we
instinctively want to believe, must needs fulfil the
function assigned to them. In doing so our reasons
deceive us as to the nature of the thing reasoned about ;
they represent it as we should like it to be rather than
as it is, and they are capable, if put to it, of inventing
it or abolishing it altogether.

I cannot myself subscribe to this conception of rea-
son. To me it seems that reasoning may, and often
does, provided of course that we reason well enough,
give us truth, truth, that is to say, not about our-
selves, but about something outside ourselves. We
think, for example, that three and two make five, not
because we want to think it, but because they do
make five ; that the constituents of water are H a O,

132 The Present and Future of Religion

not because this particular combination satisfies some
atavistic need, but because they are ; that the whole is
greater than the part, because it is ; and that A cannot
both be A and not A, because it cannot. Taking this
view that reason is sometimes unbiassed, and that,
when it is so, it may give us truth, I do not press this
criticism of the psychologists and psycho-analysts,
which is valid only if we accept their account of the
function of reason. I merely point out that, if we ac-
cept it, then it operates against its exponents as effect-
ively as against the believers in and apologists for
religion, and that, while it is employed to demonstrate
that religion is false because it is merely a rationalisa-
tion of the wishes of those who believe in it, it invali-
dates the demonstration for precisely the same reason
namely, because it is a rationalisation of the wishes
of those who employ it. In other words, the modern
criticism of religion, in so far as it proves its point,
stultifies itself, and in stultifying itself disproves its
point. If we refuse to accept it, at any rate in its en-
tirety, then we are no longer required to dismiss relig-
ion as a mere rationalisation. It may be so, of course,
but it is not necessarily so. We can, therefore, pro-
ceed to consider the case for religion on merits.

II

And here I wish to take up the thread of certain ob-
servations which I made in the last chapter with re-
gard to the various alternative types of explanation
which may be adopted by those seeking to give an
account of a thing, with particular reference to that
type of explanation which interprets the present state
of a thing in terms of its origin.

Now, all the accounts of religion summarised in
chapter vi. define and explain it in terms of its
earliest beginnings in human fear and need. Accept-
ing these accounts in the main as far as they went,

The Evolution of Religion 133

they were not, I urged, necessarily complete. Why
not ? Because to explain a thing in terms of its origin
is not to give a complete account of it as it is now.
For a complete account we must consider not only its
origin, but its consummation ; we must, in other
words, not only look backwards to the germ from
which it arose, but forwards to the end which it is
seeking to achieve. The present state of a growing and
developing thing reflects its past, no doubt ; but it
also foreshadows its future.

Suppose, for example, we take as an example of
such a growing and developing thing a youth of fif-
teen years old. How are we to describe his nature ?
To know that he was once an embryo, and that his
body still bears the traces of having been a fish is no
doubt important ; but it is equally, perhaps more,
important to know that he will one day be a man. We
may go further and say that it is only in so far as he
does one day become a man that he realises his full
nature and becomes fully himself. In so far as he falls
short of manhood, in so far as his faculties are still
immature and his body undeveloped, he has not at-
tained the proper form of his species, and has not,
therefore, realised all that he has it in him to be. The
nature of a growing thing, in other words, is not
exhibited at some half-way-house stage on the road
to its full development ; it is exhibited at, because it
is only realised at, its full development. To give a
complete account of it, therefore, we must await that
development.

The moral is that, if you want to know the nature
of a man, you must take him in the full flood of his
energies and exercise of his powers ; you must take
him, in fact, at his zenith. Until he reaches it, he is
not yet completely himself, he is only trying to be-
come himself. And since, while his nature falls short
of its full development, he is only incompletely him-
self, it follows that your description of his nature, as
it is in his immaturity, will be only incompletely a

134 The Present and Future of Religion

description. To make it complete you must include a
reference to what he is trying to become.

Or take an institution in which there is organised a
number of people living a common way of life, inspired
by a common purpose, and owning common loyalties ;
take, for example, a State. States as we know them
are imperfect and incomplete ; they are founded on
inequality and maintained by injustice, and their
governors seek to perpetuate the anomalies on which
they thrive. Moreover, though democratic in form,
the modern Western community is far from being
democratic in fact, and the system of representative
government, which professes to ascertain and to em-
body the will of the people through the machinery
of the ballot box, is little more than an elaborate
device for giving the appearance and withholding the
reality. These things are commonplaces ; we all know
them, and because of them we say that States are im-
perfect and incomplete. We also know how the mod-
ern State arose, and trace its origin in the tribal insti-
tutions of primitive societies. What are we to say of
these institutions ? Manifestly that, considered as
States, they are still more imperfect, still more in-
complete. The dreams of philosophers, not the re-
cords of historians, place the ideal State in man's
remote past.

Now let us suppose that we were to give an account
of the State as it is to-day solely in terms of its past
history, and, describing the tribal origins from which
it has arisen, were to interpret its institutions solely
in the light of those origins. Our account, it is ob-
vious, would be grossly misleading. It would omit all
those characteristics in virtue of which the modern
State has developed beyond its early prototypes, and
in the course of its development has become a less
incomplete approximation to what a State should be,
a less imperfect realisation of the State's true nature.
So far, then, our account would be incomplete. How
are we to complete it ? In the first place, by including

The Evolution of Religion 135

those features in respect of which a complex modern
society differs from a primitive tribal one. So much
is obvious. But not only these, for our account, to be
adequate, must make acknowledgement not only to
the State's past, but to its future not only to what
it has been, but to what it is trying to become. For, in
so far as it still falls short of its full development, the
modern State is to that extent not completely a State,
just as a youth in his teens is not completely a man,
and an account of the nature of the State based on a
description of the States as they are would, therefore,
not be a complete account. To determine what the
true nature of the State is, we must, it is clear, look
not merely to its elementary beginnings, not merely to
its present immaturity, but to the condition of per-
fected development which it may one day achieve.
And just as we may say of a youth that he is trying to
become a man, and that, until he does so, he has not
completely realised his nature, so we may say of all
the imperfect States in which men have hitherto
been organised that they too are trying to realise
more completely their full nature as States. Until they
do so, they are not fully themselves.

What is the moral ? That to understand the nature
of a thing you must look not merely to its begin-
nings, not even to the present stage of development
which it may have happened to achieve, but to its
fully developed condition. Until that condition is
realised, its nature is not fully revealed.

If a thing's nature is exhibited only in its complete
development, a complete account of its nature can be
given only in terms of that development. Thus, to
describe its nature as it is now, we must seek to esti-
mate its future ; so only can we hope to understand
the tentative beginnings and premonitory stirrings
that foreshadow it. A thing reflects its past, no doubt,
and to understand it we must know its past ; but it
also foreshadows its future, and to understand it we
must seek to forecast its future ; and we must do this

136 The Present and Future of Religion

not only as a disinterested exercise in prophecy, but
because the future in part determines and renders
intelligible the present. It follows that adequately to
understand a growing and developing thing we must
take into account not only the origins from which it
sprang, but the goal which it may be seeking to
achieve. We must think of it not only as determined
from behind by its past, but determined from in
front by its future. We must, in a word, introduce the
notion of purpose.

Our conclusion is in accordance with, indeed it
is demanded by, the teaching of evolution. Life,
we are agreed, changes ; it evolves. If the changes
which evolution implies are real changes and
if they are not, everything that exists must have
existed always, and time and growth and movement
are illusions then at any given stage in the growth
of a living organism the organism must be different
from what it was at the preceding stages. But it not
only changes ; it develops, and in saying that it devel-
ops we are implying that at each stage it is not only
different from but also more than it was before. Con-
sider, for example, the case of the growing human
body. The matter of which a living body is com-
posed, beginning as a microscopic speck of proto-
plasm, ends as a many-millioned colony of cells.
These cells are highly organised, and specialised for
the performance of different functions. Some are
marshalled to carry on the work of the nervous
system ; others to form the engines we call muscles ;
others, again, serve the comparatively lowly purpose
of bone-levers. Instruments of incredible delicacy,
the eye and the ear, are evolved ; yet the whole com-
plex mechanism of a living human body is developed
from a particle of living matter smaller than the finest
pin-head. Now, either these complex cells and organs
were present in the pin-head to begin with, or they
were not. If they were not, then they are literally new ;
there was, that is to say, a time when they were not,

The Evolution of Religion 137

and we are entitled to say that there is more in the
present state of the body than there was in its origin.
What is true of the life of the body is true also of
that of the mind. Knowledge which is literally new
comes into the world. An engineer knows how to
build a bridge, a mathematician understands the diff-
erential calculus. Either this knowledge and this
understanding are new in the sense that there was a
time when no mind possessed them, or they are not.
If they are not, then they existed in some form when
the earth was populated by amcebas. A similar argu-
ment may be applied to any other planet upon which
life has appeared, the conclusion being that there is
nothing new under the sun. Thus change is unreal,
since whatever is always has been, and evolution is an
illusion. If they are new, then there was a time when
the universe knew them not ; in other words, they
have appeared from nowhere, since there is nowhere
outside the universe, and evolved out of nothing.
Granted, then, that the fact of growth implies the
coming into being of new elements, that there may
be more in a thing's present state than there was in
its ingredients or its origin, granted further that this
is true of the human mind or spirit, why should we
deny its application to the expressions of the human
spirit, to art, for example, to science or to religion ?
To art and to science, indeed, we apply it readily
enough ; but what of religion ? Why should we arbi-
trarily exclude religion from the operation of the laws
of growth and development ? For it is high time to
apply these considerations to the subject of this book.
Applying them, we assert that religion can no more
receive an adequate interpretation in terms of its
origin alone than can any other growing and develop-
ing thing. This is not to say that the interpretation in
terms of origin is inappropriate, but merely that it
is not complete ; it is not complete because the
religious consciousness is more than the ingredients
from which it has emerged.

138 The Present and Future of Religion

It is also more than the psychological machinery
which is involved in its emergence. Psycho-analysts
are fond of pointing out that religion is sublimated
emotion. Primitive lusts, social maladjustments and
misfits and unacknowledged desires are mixed to-
gether in an unholy brew of which the religious
consciousness is the distilled essence. The ingre-
dients exposed, it is somehow implied that their out-
come is discredited. Erroneously, for to lay bare the
assorted and possibly disreputable elements of which
the religious consciousness may have been com-
pounded is not to show that they are that conscious-
ness ; the theory of sublimation, if it means anything
at all, means, in fact, that they are not.

A chocolate from a slot machine is the outcome of a
series of complex chemical ingredients and mechan-
ical processes. If I were to take the trouble, I could
find out what the processes are which go to the pro-
duction of the chocolate and the ingredients of which
it is compounded. I could even describe them in a
book. But I should not imagine, nor would my
readers imagine, that I was describing the chocolate,
still less that, by cataloguing its ingredients and demon-
strating the processes from which it had resulted, I
had in some mysterious way explained away the
chocolate. You cannot, admittedly, have the choco-
late without the ingredients and the mechanism. But
it does not follow that the ingredients and the mech-
anism are identical with their product. This fact
recognised in the kitchen and the factory is over-
looked in the study and the consulting-room. Refus-
ing to overlook it, I assert that an account of the
origin, the history and the psychology of religion,
interesting as it is to the anthropologist, the historian,
and the psychologist, is not an account of religion,
and that arguments derived from it cannot, therefore,
be used to discredit or to dispose of religion. Were it
not for the fears of the savage and the social malad-
justments of the citizen, religion admittedly would be

The Evolution of Religion 139

very different from what it is. But, originating in the
stress of human need and flowering on the dunghill
of human emotions, the religious consciousness rises
above its origins and transcends its machinery. The
mechanism, I repeat, is other than its product.

In its account of religion, and not of religion alone,
psycho-analysis makes the mistake of identifying, and
therefore confusing, the unconscious trends of our
nature with their conscious outcrop. Unmasking the
malevolence of our unconscious wishes, analysts
exhibit the ingenuity with which they are sublimated
to appear honourable ; they succeed ; but they also
exhibit the efficiency with which they are sublimated
so that they are indeed honourable. One day, no
doubt, psycho-analysts will succeed, if they have not
done so already, in reducing the sense of duty to
something else, probably to something discreditable,
but this would not explain away the sense of duty any
more than the successful reduction of matter to elec-
tricity explains away matter, or of religion to the
needs and desires of which it can be shown to be a
sublimation explains away religion.

For this reason criticisms of religion urged by
psycho-analysts, valid up to a point, are valueless
beyond it. It is not that they are not true, but that
they are incomplete.

If religion does, in fact, derive from the sources
summarised in the last chapter, if it has fulfilled the
needs and served the purposes there enumerated,
then it still fulfils those needs and serves those pur-
poses now. If it is the product of human fear, and
the projection of human vanity, then it will still re-
assure man's nervousness and flatter his egotism.
But while it still sustains the role which it has sus-
tained through the ages, it will no longer sustain that
role alone. It will both do more and be more, and the
"more" that it does and is will receive adequate
interpretation, in so far as it can be interpreted at
all, not in terms of the origin and history of religion,

140 The Present and Future of Religion

but in terms appropriate to its future and its goal.
Admittedly, we do not know its future and we can
only dimly guess its goal. But of this at least we may
be sure, that in the confused complex of tendencies
social and individual, inherited and acquired, instinc-
tive and intellectual in the vaguely felt aspirations
and the scarce acknowledged faith, the sense of spiri-
tual loneliness and the need of spiritual communion,
that go to make up what is called religion to-day,
there will always be present an element to which the
Freudian, or the anthropological, or the social, or
any similar account of the appeal and functions of
religion will not only not apply, but which it will
completely falsify. I say an element, but there is no
need to limit my assertion to one. Religion in the past
has been a rope of many strands ; it is not likely to
grow simple and single in the future. Let us, then,
say provisionally that there are two or, perhaps, three
aspects or phases of the religious consciousness
which none of the subjectivist explanations in terms
of the origin and past of religion can explain, and
which can be understood only in terms of what relig-
ion may become. These aspects we must try to sepa-
rate from the rest, and, having separated, use as the
point of departure for our account of the religion of
the future.

To answer the question whether religion is a perma-
nent and necessary growth of the human spirit, and
whether as such it will have a future, it is sufficient
to point out that there are such aspects. Requiring
interpretation in terms of the future rather than the
past, it is clear that, as man advances in the path of
evolution, they will become more prominent and
definite than they are to-day. Religion, therefore, in
so far as it contains them, will not die out. To answer
the further question what sort of future it may be, it
is necessary to disentangle them from the material in
which they are embedded, the material which has
come to us from religion's origin and past, and con-

The Evolution of Religion 141

sider them in isolation. It is this task which will
occupy us in the next two chapters.

Let us in conclusion summarise the results arrived
at in this one. When we have to deal with growing and
developing things, with living organisms, with the
institutions in which they are organised, and the
activities in which they find expression, the explana-
tion of their present state in terms of their origin is
inadequate. This statement is true both of morals and
of religion. To say that the moral consciousness arose
because it promoted tribal efficiency, or that the
religious consciousness arose because it promoted
cosmic comfort, tells us something, but not every-
thing about the moral or the religious consciousness
now. To understand them as they are now we must
judge them not only by their roots but by their
fruits, looking not only to what they have been, but
to what they may become. The mind, in short, is
Janus-like ; it looks forward as well as backward,
bearing upon it at any given moment traces not only
of what it has been, but what it may become. And
when we come to consider the activities in which it
expresses itself, that, for example, of the religious
consciousness, we shall find that they contain an ele-
ment which does not reflect the past, but foreshadows
the future.

The conclusion is that there is more in a complex
product like the religious consciousness than can be
adequately explained by a reference to its origin.
This "more" will be a pointer to the future, and we
must try, therefore, to disentangle it from the rest, in
order to estimate the prospects of religion in the
future.

Chapter IX
OUR DUTY TOWARDS OUR NEIGHBOUR

Chapter IX
OUR DUTY TOWARDS OUR NEIGHBOUR

This scheme to thrust forward and establish a human control
over the destinies of life and liberate it from its present dangers,
uncertainties, and miseries is ... an altogether practicable one,
subject only to one qualification, that sufficient men and women
will be willing to serve it. H. G. WELLS, The Open Conspiracy.

If the Catechism is to be believed, the Christian relig-
ion includes two duties : there is our duty towards
God, and our duty towards our neighbour. In chapter
vii. I have glanced at the origins of both of our duty
towards God in man's feeling of loneliness and insig-
nificance in face of the indifference of Nature, and of
our duty towards our neighbour in his obligation to
observe the implied contract upon which the existence
of society depends. In the last chapter I saw reason to
doubt whether this account of our religious duties in
terms of their origins was complete. Did it, I asked,
tell us about them all that there was to know, and, in
so doing, dispose of the claims of religion to objective
truth ? Answering that it did not, I must now try to
show what more there is in the religious conscious-
ness as it is to-day than its critics are prepared to
allow.

Taking the Catechism's hint as to the two elements
in religion, I propose to divide my discussion into
two parts, dealing respectively with our duty towards
God and our duty towards our neighbour. First, how-
ever, I must translate the Catechism language into
more suitable terms. For me man's duty towards God
sums up his relation to the universe as a whole ; his
duty to his neighbour, his relations to his fellow-men
as a whole. And if we may assume, as most religions
do, that there are two worlds, the world in which we
pass our daily life, and the world of which we are
held to have fleeting glimpses in spiritual and mysti-
cal experience, the world of our present and the world
of what we may hope will one day be our future
KR

146 The Present and Future of Religion

existence, the two main elements in religion define
themselves conveniently enough in terms of our
relation to these two worlds. Our relation to the
first in what I shall call its religious aspect, consists
simply in our duty to make it better ; our relation to
the second in our endeavour, and the endeavour
through us of life as a whole, to know it and, it may
be, to evolve at a level at which we may enter into
communion with it. In the present chapter I shall be
concerned with our relation to the world which we
experience in our day to day life ; in the succeeding
chapter with our relation to the world revealed in
the fleeting intimations of the spirit.
Coming, then, to our duty towards our fellow-men,
the first point that I want to emphasise is that, in
spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we do care
about the happiness of other people, and desire to
increase it, and that, in spite of all the evidence to the
contrary, we do care about the state of the world and
desire to improve it. In the evidence to the contrary I
wish to include all the more obvious truisms, such as,
that we none of us care about these things for all our
time, that few of us care about these things for most
of our time, that most of us care about them for very
little of our time, and a negligible residue perhaps
(limiting cases) for none of our time ; that we often
wish people ill and desire to give them pain ; that on
occasion, e.g., when our livers are out of order or our
lovers unkind, we disinterestedly desire (some of us)
to increase the amount of unhappiness in the world,
and that very few of us ever desire to promote the
happiness of other people when it is likely to inter-
fere with our own. All these things and more may be
admitted. It may be admitted, further, that the dis-
interested desire for the good of others, and for the
improvement of the world, alive in the young, is
dormant in the middle aged, and, more often than
not, dead in the old. Because people are unable to
express themselves politically and socially, to in-

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 147

fluence the lives of their fellows, and to feel that they
count in public affairs, they come to seem to others,
and in the course of time to themselves, self-centred
and cynical, with no interests outside the immediate
circles of family and business within which their im-
mediate activities lie. Thus the impulse to do good
in the world is thought not to exist, where in most
men it has once existed and has become atrophied.
The concern for the welfare of others, the desire to
make the world a better place, is a flame which burns
brightly, even fiercely, in youth, is douched with the
cold waters of disillusion and disappointment, flickers
uncertainly for a time and goes out. In most old men
it is completely extinguished, and to most of us even
in middle age there are left of the generous glow of
our early youth only the ashes of cynicism and materi-
alism. It should be one of the main tasks of religion to
keep that flame alight.

That it is its task is beginning already to be recog-
nised. The Modernists, as I have already pointed
out, 1 have given a new interpretation to man's duty to
his neighbour, and assigned to it a fuller importance
in the religious life. We are to do good in this world,
here and now, not because good conduct will win us
a good place in the next, but because good conduct
is good in itself. And so we find the teaching of the
Modernists characterised by a growing interest in life
as opposed to doctrine, and by a recognition of the
importance of this life for its own sake, without refer-
ence to its bearing upon our prospects in another.
Religion, as Bishop Barnes repeatedly points out,
must evolve. What does that mean, if not that its con-
cern is with the needs of the present and the possibili-
ties of the future, rather than with the dogmas of the
past ! Religion, in fact, if it is to survive, must again
oecome a social force, and the religious attitude, in-
stead of being confined, as it has been in the past, to
a particular set of activities springing from an isolated
1 Chapter ii., p. 31.

148 The Present and Future of Religion

and unique side of our nature vaguely conceived as
spiritual, must permeate every aspect of our person-
ality, and extend into all the avocations of our daily
life.

What is required, then, is to bring religion out
of the church into the market-place, and a praise-
worthy attempt is made to do so, the religious
point of view being, for example, defined in re-
lation to the world of business and to industrial
disputes.

Concrete expressions of the Modernist movement
include community services, the Church support of
prohibition in the United States, and the interven-
tion of the Churches in the mining dispute of 1926 in
England. The so-called "Bishops' Plan" for the
settlement of the dispute, put forward in July, was,
though unsuccessful, a good illustration of the Mod-
ernist conception of the function of religion in social
life.

All this, no doubt, is admirable. It is unfortunate
that people do not take it seriously. It may be that it
is the destiny of Christianity, it may even be that it is
the destiny of the Church of England, to revivify
religion by regenerating the world. But it is unlikely.
The Churches have to fight not only against the evils
of the present, but against the traditions of their own
past. Throughout their history they have with sing-
ular unanimity ranged themselves on the side of re-
action and oppression. Is it credible that they can to-
day assume the role of the champions of progress and
enlightenment ? Can the ecclesiastical leopard change
his reactionary spots ? There are men in the Church,
admittedly, who would willingly and unsparingly give
time and energy to such a cause, who would lay down
life itself, if they thought that by doing so they could
make the religion of Jesus Christ an effective agent
in the building of a better world. There are such men
in the Church, there always have been, and they are
the salt of the earth. But equally they are, as they

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 149

always have been, hopelessly unrepresentative of the
general body of the paid exponents of the teaching of
Christ.

For consider what the social record of the Church
has been. It is only a few hundred years ago that
priests and theologians were burning by the thou-
sand men and women whom they believed to be in
league with the devil, and whom they denounced
as the causes of illnesses and thunderstorms, and
anything else for which they could not otherwise
account. To suggest the slightest alleviation of the
prolonged torture of these victims was denounced
by educated and cultured clerics of all denominations
alike, and practically to a man, as "an offence to
God." But I do not want to soil these pages with the
horrors of the Church's persecuting past; suffice it,
therefore, to say that cruelty both more in quantity
and more fiendish in quality has been inflicted by
representatives of the religion of Christ (both the
Roman Catholic and Protestant varieties of that relig-
ion) upon those who have ventured to disagree with
them than by any other class of living creature,
whether human or animal, upon any other class.
This, at least, is the considered judgment of so
weighty an authority as Lecky, 1 who concludes several
pages of description of the appalling atrocities per-
petuated by Christians upon one another in the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries at the instigation of the
Church, with the comment that these things were
done in the name of Him who commanded his
followers to love one another.

Turning our backs upon these horrors, let us con-
sider the Church of England in the last century, when
it had largely ceased to be persecuting and had be-
come merely reactionary. Every claim for justice,
every appeal to reason, every movement for equality,
every proposal to relieve the poverty, to mitigate the

1 See Lecky 's History of European Morals.

150 The Present and Future of Religion

savagery, or to enlighten the ignorance of the masses
was morally certain to encounter the opposition of
the Church. From many similar instances, I cite a
few at random. The clergy of the Established Church
either actively opposed or were completely indiffer-
ent to the abolition of the slave trade. Even the pious
Churchman Wilberforce, writing in 1832, was com-
pelled to admit that "the Church clergy have been
shamefully lukewarm in the cause of slavery aboli-
tion." They opposed the movement for the abolition
of the Rotten Boroughs, prophesying that, if the Re-
form Bill of 1832 was carried, it would lead to the
destruction of the Establishment. They opposed in
1806 Whitbread's Bill to establish parish schools in
England out of the rates, the Archbishop complaining
that the proposal would take too much power from
the clergy. State education was indeed persistently
and at all times opposed by the Church, because "it
would enable the labouring classes to read seditious
pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against
Christianity." 1 They opposed the efforts of Joseph
Arch in the seventies to secure better wages for the
half-starved agricultural labourer.
All through the century, whenever and wherever
there is a movement for change and betterment,
the clergy are found opposing it. In this they were
merely carrying on the tradition of their order.
When one looks back over history, one realises that
there is scarcely any discovery which science has
made for human advancement and happiness which
churchmen and theologians have not violently
opposed. Not content with burning each other,
they burnt the men who discovered the earth's
motion, burnt the men who made the first tenta-
tive beginnings of physics and chemistry, burnt the
men who laid the foundations of our medical know-
ledge.

1 Mr. Giddy, afterwards President of the Royal Society under
the name of Gilbert, in 1807.

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 151

When science made it possible to fight smallpox epi-
demics, churchmen opposed the necessary sanitary
measures as an attempt to escape merited punish-
ment, and denounced vaccination as "an offence to
God." When chloroform was invented, they opposed
its use, especially in childbirth had not Goa laid a
primaeval curse upon woman ? and denounced it as
"an offence to God." A hundred years ago, when
the discovery of the steam-engine made railways
possible, the clergy preached against them as
"unnatural" and a sin against God. To-day they are
denouncing birth control as "unnatural" and "an
offence to God." In the eighteenth century they op-
posed the use of lightning conductors as an interfer-
ence with God's intentions, in the sixteenth they
opposed the introduction of forks for use at table, and
denounced them from the pulpit !

Bad as has been the Church's record in the past, it is
not greatly improved in the present. The Church's
opposition to any movement making for social change
is still notorious. Let us take as an example and con-
sider in a little more detail the question of birth control.
The case for birth control is one of the strongest in
modern times. So strong is it, and so familiar are the
arguments in its favour, that it is unnecessary to re-
peat them here. For the knowledge and facilities
requisite for the control of birth there is an over-
whelming demand. Confronted with the fact of this
demand, what is the attitude of the Church ? The
Church has varied between two attitudes. Burying its
head ostrich like in the ecclesiastical sand, it has pre-
tended that it had never heard of the artificial control
of birth, and that there is, therefore, no problem ;
when the fact has been forced upon its attention, it
has disapproved, denounced, and opposed it. The
first is the normal, the second is the official attitude
of the Church, as witness, for example, the following
pronouncement contained in the report of the
Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion,

152 The Present and Future of Religion

held at Lambeth Palace, 5th July to yth August,
1920 :

An emphatic warning is given against the use of unnatural
means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave
dangers physical, moral, and religious thereby incurred, and
against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens
the race.

The governing considerations of Christian marriage are its
primary purpose the continuation of the race through the gift
and heritage of children ; and the paramount importance in
married life of deliberate and thoughtful self-control.

This sounded excellent, but nobody seemed to pay
much attention. On the contrary, as time went on,
morals grew palpably laxer, youth noticeably more
lawless, the list of divorce cases longer, dress more
immodest, while birth control was notoriously spread-
ing among all classes of the community. Something
it was obvious must be done about this question of
sex. But, beyond occasionally denouncing the wicked-
ness of youth, or the materalism of the age, the
Church has done nothing. Questions involving sex
occasion, and always have occasioned, the Church
discomfort. Spiritually (it seems difficult to avoid
dropping into the feminine gender at this point) she
blushes when her attention is drawn to them, and, as
soon as may be, averts her eyes, gathers up her skirts,
and passes by on the other side. And so the behaviour
of the Church has, on the whole, been that of the
ostrich. Despite the recommendation of the Lambeth
Conference, her general attitude on the subject of
birth control remains obscure, and most people would
find difficulty in saying what it is. On this, one of the
most important and for many minds perplexing, issues
of the day, she has given no lead at all. So harmful to
the influence of the Church is the effect of this
masterly silence felt to be that in the summer of 1929
the Rev. Edward Lyttelton, late headmaster of Eton,
published a book, The Christian and Birth Control,

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 153

in which he besought the Church for light and lead-
ing. The book, circulated by the S.P.C.K., begins
with an "Open letter to the Bishops/' The following
extracts are interesting as showing the distress of an
enlightened Christian, at the hesitancy and vacilla-
tion, to use no stronger words, of the Church.

MY LORDS, A certain perplexity in modern life has lately arisen
and assumed a form most acute and most urgent. . . . Far and
wide, almost without exception in every section of our community,
there is bewilderment about the right line of action in the restric-
tion of the size of families, which has been forced upon us by the
social and economic conditions of our time. From that bewilder-
ment and symptomatic of it has arisen the problem loosely entitled
Birth Control.

Elderly people often talk of the lawlessness of the rising genera-
tion. But this is a misuse of language. The lawlessness is not on
their part, but on ours. Their conduct exhibits, not violation of the
law, but ignorance of it. They are beset by over-mastering natural
desires inflamed by promptings from every quarter, which, wholly
untrammelled, gather volume day by day. If those to whom they
naturally look as their guides and guardians of their moral life
"keep silence, yea, even from good words" the result is a foregone
conclusion. Who, then, are they that ought to speak ? Who but the
shepherds and bishops of their souls ?

We are all being judged, tested, sifted, when on a great scale a
free but very difficult choice of conduct is presented to the wit-
nesses whom Christ has chosen. Especially is this true when there
is divergence of opinion among our leaders, so that a strong unani-
mous affirmation seems to be impossible. I cannot believe that the
divergence of opinion among your Lordships is fundamental. As a
test, let this proposition be weighed.

If contraception is not wrong, in many cases it must be right.
Will any pastor of a flock say this from his pulpit ? Will any
Bishop put his name to a document commending the practice,
even to dwellers in the slums ? Why not ? Or will any ordained
minister of God's Word and Sacraments avow in public that he is
himself a contraceptionist ? If not, why not ? It is because the
voice of conscience is still in many quarters believed to be the
Voice of God.

Practically, then, your Lordships, hesitating to affirm, would
actually deny that the matter is serious.

The Rev. Lyttelton goes on to hint that the only

154 Th* Present and Future of Religion

clear and definite lead which it is possible for the
Church to give consists in the reamrmation of the
sanctity of marriage, coupled with a general prohibi-
tion of contraceptive methods, a prohibition subject
to qualification in hard cases. Whatever we may think
of the author's own recommendation, we can at least
agree with him that a Church which aspired to the
moral leadership of the country would at least have
the courage to take a definite line. About its attitude,
whether right or wrong, there would be no doubt, so
that none should have the excuse of ignorance for act-
ing in opposition to its teaching.

The importance of giving a definite lead is realised
by the Roman Catholic Church, which, with its usual
appreciation of the needs of the situation, thunders
in season and out against birth control, and threatens
those who practise it with hell fire. "The Church
does teach that the frustration of the natural conse-
quences of marital life, either by imperfect acts or by
the use of artificial means of whatever kind, whether
chemical or instrumental, is always a deadly sin,
meriting eternal damnation unless sincerely repented
of before death." So Dr. Arendzen, stating the Cath-
olic point of view on birth control in a newspaper
Symposium. Not so, however, the average Anglican
parson. Sharing the Catholic's disapproval, he lacks
his outspokenness, so that beyond the feeling, a feel-
ing which with most men has become a kind of in-
stinct (the Church, it is well known, is always oppos-
ing and disapproving of something, especially if it is
new), that parsons object to birth control, and that
the subject had better be avoided in their presence,
the average man does not know what the Church's
view is, and, not knowing, he does not care. And the
feeling of the average man is quite right. Of course
the Churches disapprove ; they always do ; but they
lack, most of them, the courage to say so. Vaguely
but obstinately they oppose divorce and seek to per-
petuate the misery of the unhappily married ; and

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 155

vaguely but obstinately they oppose birth control,
and seek to drive working class women to the mad-
house or the grave through excess of child bearing.
As usual, they are playing Canute to the tide. A
day will come when it will seem as strange to our de-
scendants that anyone ever opposed birth control,
as it seems strange to us now that serious, intelligent,
and well-meaning people ever withheld the mercy of
anaesthetics on principle, or for the glory of their God
subjected multitudes of their fellow-men and women
to the most abominable tortures.

A Church with such a past and such a present does
not inspire optimism in regard to its future. Is it
really credible that the Anglican Church, as we know
it to-day, can take the lead in directing and exploiting
the vague enthusiasm for social betterment which
animates young men and women, and from which
springs that stream of religious feeling which finds
expression in our "duty towards our neighbour ? "
It scarcely seems to. That the idealism, the loyalties,
and the self-sacrifice to which this half-unconscious
obligation to our fellows gives rise are an integral part
of religion I am convinced ; they are probably a grow-
ing part, but I doubt if, in spite of the efforts of the
Modernists, they will bestow a new lease of life upon
the failing faith which is organised in the Church of
England.

If, then, as I insist, this social aspect of religion is a
real aspect, if, as I believe, it is likely to play an
increasingly important role in the world of the future,
in what form is it likely to express itself ? It is time to
return from our digression and to take up the main
thread of the argument.

Asserting the existence of disinterested benevolence
which dictates the performance of our "duty towards
our neighbours," I was careful to protect myself from
the cynics by limiting and qualifying my assertion in
every possible way. Claiming little more than its bare
existence, I admitted that it manifested itself inter-

156 The Present and Future of Religion

mittently in the best of us, and that in most of us,
particularly after middle age, it has died a natural
death. It is difficult to make righteousness readable,
difficult to write well of one's fellows, without being
written ill of oneself. My theme being disinterested
benevolence, I shall do my utmost to keep my right-
eousness within bounds. Meanwhile, feeling guiltily
conscious of the unworldliness of my central asser-
tion, I have squirted round it a little worldly ink for
my own satisfaction and the discomfiture of my
critics. Having done so, I proceed to reiterate it.

It is, then, my conviction that, other things being
equal, we do, on the whole, desire to do good in the
world, and to promote the happiness and well-being
of our neighbours. That they rarely are equal is true ;
but that is not our fault ; also it is not the point. It is
this desire, I say, which lies at the root of our duty
towards our neighbour, and expresses itself in what,
for the sake of a better word, I shall call the political
impulse. It is a desire which all of us experience in
greater or less degree because we are men ; if a man
did not possess it, he would be, in respect of his
deficiency, not wholly and completely a man. Nor
should its existence occasion surprise. Man, after all,
is a political and social being who has lived for the
past five hundred generations in society. And, since
the prosperity and misfortunes of society produce an
undeniable effect for good or ill upon the individual,
it is only natural, to put the matter on its lowest
ground, that the individual should care about the
well-being of those who with himself constitute what
is called society.

But this is to interpret in terms of origins, and in this
chapter we are concerned with those expressions of
the human spirit which cannot be so interpreted. Re-
fusing, then, to put the matter at its lowest, we shall
recognise simply that we all of us on occasion have
the saluspopuli deeply at heart, and do, in spite of all
appearances to the contrary, concern ourselves about

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 157

the happiness and welfare of others, especially of
those others who happen to be poor and oppressed.

Concerned with the welfare of our neighbours, we
desire to influence their lives and to influence them
in the direction which seems to us to be good. That
we are often mistaken as to what is for their good,
and that, whether we are mistaken or not, they rarely
agree with us, is true but irrelevant. But it is not
enough to be interested in the "well-being of the
people" if you are powerless to improve their lives,
or even to set before them your own conception of
how life ought to be lived. Hence arises the almost
universal desire for some sort of influence or control,
however limited, in the affairs of society. Men wish
to feel somehow that they count, that their thoughts
and actions matter, and that it is not beyond the
bounds of possibility that some one of their thoughts
or actions might really influence society, and be of
service to their fellow-men.

For this desire the structure of modern society makes
little provision ; its existence is unwillingly recog-
nised witness the discouragement by old and re-
spectable persons of Socialism in the young and,
when recognised, it is denied expression. Nor can it
easily secure it. One of the chief drawbacks of the
modern State is its size. So vast are the forces at work
in society, so complex and elaborate the structure of
Government, and so intricate and difficult to dis-
entangle the different strands that condition events,
that, so far from controlling them, men are unable
even to understand them. In face of the complex
organisation of society, the individual feels impotent.
Events which occur seem to be not so much the result
of human will and effort, as of the interplay of blind
and uncontrollable forces whose genesis escapes de-
tection, and whose object, if any, is shrouded in
mystery. Men are driven more and more to that inter-
pretation of phenomena with which Mr. Hardy's
novels have made us familiar, to the notion of a blind,

158 The Present and Future of Religion

unthinking Thing, will-less and purposeless, which
determines the march of events without plan or pur-
pose, and, as it fares remorselessly on its appointed
way, furthers human efforts without purpose and
thwarts them without malignity ; a Thing before
whose power man's endeavour is powerless, or, if it
succeeds, successful by chance and not from in-
trinsic merit.

And this conception is thrust upon men not through
an intellectual adhesion to the doctrines of deter-
minism, nor from any spiritual flirting with fatalism,
but simply from the spectacle of a social mechanism
so vast that the individual man seems powerless to
modify its workings or to mould its ends. It is this
notion of a canvas too big for human designs that
seems to have inspired Mr. Keynes's famous com-
ment on the working of the forces that made the
Versailles Treaty : "One felt most strongly the im-
pression described by Tolstoy in War and Peace, or
by Hardy in The Dynasts, of events marching on to
their fated conclusion uninfluenced and unaffected
by the cerebrations of statesmen in council. " It is the
size of the machine which thwarts the individual's
impulse to pull his weight in society, and not some
peculiar characteristic of social affairs which renders
them necessarily unamenable to human control.

As a result of this feeling of impotence, the impulse
to politics either perishes from inanition, or becomes
diverted into side-channels whose outlets would be
humorous if they were not pathetic. Those whose
impulses seek an emotional rather than an intellectual
outlet, whose hearts are, in common parlance, better
than their heads, seek in social work and meddling
with the morals of the poor that satisfaction which
they fail to find in bona fide political activity. The
respect which their superior culture, manners, and
wealth obtain for them amongst the lower classes
creates the fiction that here at last is to be found a
sphere of influence in which their talent may find

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 159

an outlet in activities which are as pleasant as they are
salutary. Thus the political impulse finds its vent in
investigating the habits of the poor, cataloguing their
deficiencies, stigmatising their wastefulness, and
distributing coal and blankets to mitigate the more
acute forms of distress among the deserving.

Those whose characteristics are pre-eminently in-
tellectual, whose heads are better than their hearts,
finding that the magnitude and impersonality of the
forces that govern society deny their talents their
natural scope in the control and improvement of the
lives of others, sink into the soured cynicism, satirical
flippancy, and political apathy which are so charac-
teristic of the intelligentsias of the modern world.
They cry sour grapes at politics, stigmatise it as a
dirty game in which the stakes are personal ambition
instead of the welfare of the community, and, like the
Russian intellectuals in the last years of the Tsardom,
take refuge in dilettantism, psycho-analysis, and the
pursuit of art for art's sake. The characters in
Tchekov's plays provide a good illustration of the
lassitude of intellectuals whose energies are denied
legitimate expression in public affairs. Failing to obtain
recognition in a world in which the main passport to
eminence is a vulgar self-advertisement and a cultiva-
tion of the arts of popular appeal and display, they are
forced to save their self-respect by making a virtue
of their impotence. Ostentatiously they abandon
interest in the affairs of society, and seek consolation
in love, in art, and personal intrigue.

About art, they urge, there is something quintessen-
tial and sublime, which invests it with a reality which
is greater than the illusory interests of the world of
common men. "Personal relations," they cry with
Mr. E. M. Forster in Howard's End, "are the real life
for ever and ever," and devote themselves to the
cultivation and analysis of their friends. As for love,
it is, as Aldous Huxley has pointed out, for persons
of intelligence the best of indoor sports.

160 The Present and Future of Religion

The intellectuals having withdrawn, the direction
of society passes to other and less worthy hands. The
popular platform, grown too big for the still small
voice of reason, is captured by Cleon the leather-
lunged, who in a class conscious democracy achieves
power by exploiting the simple emotions ol greed,
hatred, and intolerance.

These are the diseases of democracy ; they grow
more apparent as the State grows larger and civilisa-
tion more complex, and young men and women,
driven by the urge of a political impulse seeking ex-
pression, are beginning to take arms against them.
One of the most marked features of social life since
the war has been the coming together of young men
and women inspired by the spirit of service, and
seeking in comradeship and community of purpose
some substitute for the purely individualistic and
self-seeking standards which dominate the lives of
their elders. In its milder forms the movement issues
in a new return to nature. Originating in Germany,
where youth's dissatisfaction with the ways of its
elders has been sharpened by the bitterness of defeat,
the return to nature has become one of the most dis-
tinctive features of the national life. Organised in the
Wandervogel, young Germans have turned their backs
upon the cities, and, scorning money-making and
abjuring ambition, sought and found a simpler and
more comradely life on the roads and in the woods.
Even in England the movement grows apace. The
British Federation of Youth, a body with an aggre-
gate membership of over 50,000, reports that tramps,
rambles, week-end camps, visits to permanent coun-
try hostels and guest-houses, and so forth, are be-
coming an increasingly important part of its work.
Interwoven with this movement are the week-end
schools and the extended summer schools run by youth
organisations. Those who are familiar with this back-
to-the-country movement agree that it is producing a
new attitude of mind amongst those who take part in

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 161

it. On long tramps across Europe, or it may be on a
series of week-end walks, the members of a group of
young people will come to know each other with an
intimacy denied to urban acquaintances, and make
the first tentative beginnings of community life. If
this is to be done successfully, tact, mutual under-
standing, mutual respect, self-control, and self-disci-
pline must be shown by each member of the group.
Thus arises a new conception of the possibilities of
social life. It is this attempt to communalise life which
runs like a continuous thread through the various
activities of modern youth. Whether in pleasure or in
work, in play or in study, young people to-day are
attempting to co-operate. Having emancipated them-
selves from the narrow home circle, they find their
liberty unsatisfying unless they can learn to enjoy it
in common. The task is a difficult one ; there are
many failures. But clearly it is worth while. In the
past the child and the youth were too often virtually
prisoners in a narrow family circle. They left that
circle only when they married and themselves formed
a new home, soon to be peopled with its new genera-
tion of prisoners. First as prisoners, then as jailers,
they spent all their lives in captivity. In such condi-
tions even the first steps towards community life were
impossible. To-day there is the hope born of a new
opportunity ; to-day we are seeing the first fumbling
endeavours at community living.
This coming together of youth in comradeship in
work and in play is, if I am right, a hesitating expres-
sion of that political impulse which I have identi-
fied with one aspect of the religious spirit. But the
renaissance of modern youth is not limited to country
rambles and week-end talks. It has other and more
definitely political aspects. The insurgence of youth
in politics is irreparably bound up with the dpfcfifi^
of democracy, and it will be necessary tjtfpf$W&k
what I have to say with a few observations op/that
decline.
LR

162 The Present and Future of Religion

I have spoken above of the political apathy of the
modern citizen in face of the size and complexity of
the modern State. He is apathetic because he realises
that he does not count, because he feels that his will
cannot be made to matter. And yet and this is the
paradox of modern society Government proceeds
upon the assumption that he does count and that his
will does matter. Modern democracy, in fact, is a de-
vice for giving to thepeople the appearance, but not
the reality of power. The people, like the king, govern
in theory, but not in practice. But because in theory
they are the source of power, because those who gov-
ern are in theory their representatives, the people, in
fact, determine the kind of questions which Govern-
ments discuss, or, rather, those which they do not dis-
cuss. The electorate takes a small and diminishing
interest in politics. Yet it determines the questions in
which politicians must interest themselves.

This sounds cryptic, and I must elaborate further.
The electorate, I affirm, is politically apathetic the
fact is obvious. Sixty years ago, when the exercise of
the vote was the prerogative of the privileged classes,
it paid the newspapers to print verbatim reports of
parliamentary proceedings. The electorate, though
small, was interested. To-day it is often impossible to
tell from a perusal of the morning paper whether
Parliament is sitting. Those who elect no longer de-
sire to know the sayings and doings of those whom
they elect. Nevertheless, from time to time those who
are elected have to catch and hold the interest of the
electorate. Why ? In order that they may be elected
again. To secure re-election they must speak of the
things that appeal to the electors, and upon the suc-
cess of their appeal on these occasions their careers
depend. They return to power with a mandate to pro-
ceed with the measures which have formed the issues
at the election, to do, that is to say, the things that
have seemed attractive to the electorate. Thus the
issues that have caught the interest of the electors

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 163

come to be the issues which chiefly occupy the atten-
tion of democratically elected Governments.

What are the issues that catch the interest of an apa-
thetic electorate ? They find vent in cries such as
"Hang the Kaiser," scares like the Zinovieff letter,
or vindictive meannesses like, "Make Germany
pay." Yet these are not matters with which the Gov-
ernment of a great country can afford to be concerned.
And the defect of modern democracy is just this,
that the questions with which it ought to be con-
cerned are too difficult and too technical to arouse the
enthusiasm, or even to secure the attention, of the
modern voter. Or they win his interest only to offend
his prejudices. For example, the first duty of a mod-
ern Government is to prevent war. Another war, it is
obvious, will destroy our civilisation. It is equally ob-
vious that it is only by the subordination of individual
States to the arbitrament of some central inter-
national authority that war can be prevented. Yet this
essential measure is one which no popularly elected
statesman dare advocate ; it would outrage national
pride and offend the patriotism of the electors.

Again, it is essential to the well-being of modern
civilisation that the optimum population, both for the
world and for individual States, should be determined
and steps taken to control the birth rate in accord-
ance with the estimate reached. But no responsible
statesman dare even discuss, far less advocate such a
measure ; it would shock the moral sentiments of the
electors.

Again, the world control and rationing of raw ma-
terials by a central economic board is an indispens-
able condition of the peaceful and harmonious de-
velopment of civilisation. It is the only alternative to
Imperialism, and the wars to which Imperialism in-
evitably leads. Yet the subject is dull and technical,
the necessary arrangements complex, and the argu-
ments for the proposal not such as to lend themselves
to popular exposition upon the election platform ;

164 The Present and Future of Religion

hence it is not mentioned. Instances could be multi-
plied indefinitely. The matters which are really essen-
tial to the security of our precariously poised civilisa-
tion are not those with which democratic Govern-
ments concern themselves, because they are not those
which arouse the enthusiasm of popular electorates.
They are too complex and difficult to understand, or
too shocking and unpatriotic to discuss. Thus, modern
democracy, though lacking the substance of positive
power, does, in fact, exercise power negatively by
determining the kind of matters with which Govern-
ments concern themselves, and, what is more impor-
tant, those with which they do not.
Now, as I pointed out above, the government of a
modern State is an increasingly complex and intricate
business. It is a matter for experts. So delicate are the
adjustments upon which modern society rests, so far-
reaching the ramifications of apparently insignificant
governmental actions, that it becomes increasingly
difficult to know what should be done, if only be-
cause of the difficulty of determining what is likely
to be the effect of what is done. The world it is a
commonplace has become one economic unit. The
discovery of oil springs in the Caucasus may throw
English miners out of work, and a strike in a Japanese
silk factory may render a spinster living in a Bourne-
mouth boarding-house incapable of paying her bill.
In a word, what is done anywhere tends to have rever-
berations everywhere. Thus, while the work of gov-
ernment grows more intricate as society grows more
complex and States increasingly interdependent, the
democracy whose business it is to cope with it be-
comes increasingly incapable of understanding the
problems that arise. In a modern community it is im-
possible to determine what the results of a given
policy may be. Hence a tentative and experimental
attitude to politics is desirable. Yet the modern poli-
tician, if he is to win the suffrages of the electors,
must profess a dogmatic certainty as to the absolute

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 165

lightness of certain policies, which have not been
tried, while his opponent must be equally certain of
their wrongness. The politician ought to be able to say,
"I am rather inclined to think that the tax on certain
raw materials should be lowered. I am not sure of this,
but I am inclined to try it. I shall make the experiment
for eighteen months, and, if I turn out to be wrong,
shall revise or review the policy .' 'But what he has to say
is, "No duties, no tariffs !" "Free trade in everything !
and act as if he believed it. Democracy, in short,
assumes that the average citizen is capable of grasping
more complex issues than is, in fact, the case, that
he is born free and equal, that he has in theory all the
wisdom that government requires, and that, utilising
this wisdom, he wishes to exercise through his chosen
representatives the various powers of Government.

There is, as we have seen, no warrant for these as-
sumptions. On the contrary, the average elector, apa-
thetic and helpless in the vast mechanism of the mod-
ern State, is bored with political questions, so bored
that his interest can only be momentarily roused by
election stunts. Hence politics become for him a
matter of golden promises and capricious revenges, of
taxing the brewers or the motorists or the landlords,
of free breakfast-tables, and making Germany pay.
These are not the issues which affect the life of the
community, and the conclusion is, therefore, forced
upon us that democracy is and will increasingly be-
come incapable of carrying on the functions of gov-
ernment. And, dimly sensing its incapacity, it be-
comes increasingly incapable. Hence democracy
moves in a vicious circle. The electorate is too un-
instructed politically to cope with the problems that
beset the modern State. The State accordingly func-
tions without its intervention ; and, seeing the State
proceeding on its way without reference to his will or
his wishes, the ordinary man becomes discouraged,
and, losing interest in politics, becomes more politic-
ally uninstructed than before. Thus, while the task

1 66 The Present and Future of Religion

of statesmanship becomes increasingly difficult, those
in whom the power theoretically resides become in-
creasingly unfitted for the task. To guide the ship of
State aright through the shoals that beset it there is
required a clear conception of the perils ahead, and a
conscious and continuously directive purpose to
avoid them. Is it conceivable that such direction can
result from the haphazard decision of the ballot-box,
given once every five years upon insignificant issues
dressed up as "questions of the day" to catch the
votes of a fundamentally bored electorate ? One
might as well select engineers to build a bridge by
taking a flapper's plebiscite on the most handsome
film faces among Hollywood males.

At this point youth intervenes, and in the course of
its intervention reveals itself as animated by the
closest approximation to the religious spirit that this
generation has known.

One of the most marked features of social life since
the war is the new determination to take a hand in
public affairs which has evinced itself in young men
and women, a determination to take a hand which
speedily tends to become a determination to take
control. This determination is the strength, if it is
not the source of Fascism and of Bolshevism, and it
is the negation of democracy as the Liberalism of the
nineteenth century understood democracy. Im-
pressed on the one hand by the incompetence of
aemocracy to handle the affairs of a modern com-
munity, and discouraged, on the other, by the apathy
and helplessness to which the size and complexity of
the State condemns the citizen who is content to play
the political game according to democratic rules,
groups of young men have taken the political bit be-
tween their teeth and sought to impose their will upon
the community whether it liked it or not. On the
whole, it has disliked it less than might have been
supposed. It has protested, but it has protested less
violently than the admirers of democracy had led us

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 167

to expect. Throughout Europe to-day there is a grow-
ing distrust of constitutional government and a
willingness to try new forms, which suggest that the
present generation is more prepared to be experi-
mented with than its fathers. The willingness is no
doubt in part the result of the apathy to which I have
already referred, the average citizen having come to
rate politics as of too little importance to him person-
ally to warrant his caring much under what form of
Government he lives. Whether he cares or not has
been a matter of comparative indifference to the ar-
dent spirits who are resolved to govern him for his
good. For they have not professed to express the
voice of the people ; they have not even sought to
obtain a majority. The people, they have urged, are
too ignorant to know, or too soft to do what is neces-
sary, even did they know. Disavowing, therefore, the
democratic belief in persuasion as a bourgeois super-
stition, and prepared to compel where they are un-
able to convert, they have felt so certain of the recti-
tude of their aims and the justice of their cause, so
convinced that they alone possessed the cure for
which the ills of post-war society were clamouring,
that they have not hesitated to insist that society
should take their medicine whether it would or no.
Successfully to insist, they have needed force, and,
needing it, they have not scrupled to use it. Now, the
successful use of force involves discipline, and one of
the most interesting characteristics of the post-war
type of young men of whom I am speaking has been
their willingness, in pursuit of their ideals, to subject
themselves to discipline. Rejecting the ordinary sen-
sual existence with which most members of a pros-
perous Western community identify the good life,
disdaining to amass large quantities of money, and
foregoing ambition and a worldly career, they have
been willing in peace-time to undergo the hardships
of the soldier in war. Like him, they have put them-
selves, their lives, and their fortunes unreservedly at

168 The Present and Future of Religion

the disposal of some external authority ; like him,
they have obeyed orders and submitted to training ;
and., like him, they have been prepared to face danger
and death in the service of their cause. Unlike him,
they are austere, living simply, drinking little or not at
all, reasonably monogamous and eschewing intimacies
with women outside the marriage tie. In their aims
and ambitions, in their habits in little things and their
resolves in big ones, in their way of life and willing-
ness for death, in their work and their play, they are
as different as possible from the ordinary soft citizen
of the ordinary industrial democratic community.
They are men devoted, and the cause to which they
have devoted themselves is the regeneration of so-
ciety. Thus they acknowledge their duty towards
their neighbour.

That these, or something like them, are the ideals
with which militant young men have been imbued,
and that, pursuing them, they have profoundly in-
fluenced the social structure, the history of several
European countries since the war bears ample witness.

Naturally they have had most success in those coun-
tries which, having suffered most from the war, found
themselves most incompetent to deal with the legacy
of problems it left behind it. Only in Italy and Russia
(and possibly to some extent in Spain) have they actu-
ally captured the Governments ; but similar move-
ments are afoot in all countries, and merely bide their
time until the folly of another war or some over-
whelming economic catastrophe has sapped the pros-
perity and shattered the self-complacency of the
citizens.

Now, these movements are essentially disinterested.
They may be wrong-headed, they may be tyrannical
and reactionary, unsuited to the needs of the time and
inimical to progress, but they are inspired in the main
by the wish to promote what their members conceive
to be the good of society and not the personal ambi-
tions of those who compose them.

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 169

In their conception of that good, they are, I believe,
profoundly mistaken. So far as political ends are
concerned I am an old fashioned Liberal in the wide,
a Socialist in the strict sense, regarding liberty and
equality, freedom for the expression of every variety
of thought and every shade of opinion, and a respect
for the rights and the privacy of the individual as
paramount social goods. On the economic side I de-
sire to see an equal distribution of material wealth,
and would rank myself a supporter of Shaw's pro-
gramme of equal incomes for all, irrespective of ser-
vices rendered to the community. Of these social ends
which I hold to be valuable, one only, that of equal
distribution of material goods, seems to be held in
honour in Bolshevik Russia, and even this seems to be
less, rather than more, likely to be realised as Bol-
shevism settles down. For the rest, I see no attempt
to achieve any of the other ends of value I have men-
tioned by those whose methods I have described. On
the contrary, they countenance violence and intoler-
ance, restrict freedom of thought and speech, and
exalt the State above the individual, with the result
that I know not whether the more to admire the loy-
alty, the discipline, and the self-sacrifice of the young
men by whose endeavours the post-war Govern-
ments of Italy and Russia have come to power, or to
deplore the ends which these qualities have been em-
ployed to serve.

But this is no place for a discussion, still less for a
criticism, of the aims and methods of Bolshevism and
Fascism, and I do not propose to embark upon it.
Indeed, it is irrelevant to my subject, which is the
manifestation of what I have called the political im-
pulse (and hence of religion in so far as the political
impulse is an expression of religion) in modern so-
ciety, and its probable development in the future.

And here let me emphasise the point that these move-
ments of militant and disciplined youth, these ex-
pressions of the community spirit in the endeavour

170 The Present and Future of Religion

to promote what is thought to be the good of the
community, seem to me essentially religious. They
represent an attempt to do one's duty towards one s
neighbour because it is one's duty. And, estimating
the future of religion, or, rather, of this aspect of relig-
ion, I should say that it rests with these and similar
movements of young men and women of all coun-
tries, inspired by these and similar emotions ; but not,
I hope, directed to similar ends.

It is not, I repeat, the ends of Bolshevism and Fas-
cism that seem to me to be good ; it is the spirit which
animates those who pursue them, or who pursued
them in their days of unpopularity and danger, that
I find admirable. What are the enduring social goods ?
Peace and toleration, justice and equity, the education
and enlightenment of all citizens. Cannot we harness
some of the energy and enthusiasm that has animated
Communism and Fascism, cannot we command some
small part of the loyalty and self-sacrifice that have
been lavished so ungrudgingly in the cause of human
suffering in pursuit of these ends ? Can we not utilise
the religious spirit to promote what is good ? It seems
not.

It is one of the tragedies of humanity that man's
noblest qualities have usually been called forth in de-
fence of ends that are harmful. Just as the intensity
with which men have embraced their beliefs has usu-
ally been in inverse proportion to their truth, so the
self-sacrificing idealism which they have displayed in
pursuit of their ends has been usually in inverse pro-
portion to the value of the ends pursued. Men have
collectively suffered torments in order to go to heaven
or to convert the Jews ; but very little for the sake of
spreading knowledge, and scarcely at all to promote
happiness or to produce beauty.

This is unfortunate, and it is worth while consider-
ing why our collective endeavours should be so ill-
advised. Most of men's social activities have been
undertaken under compulsion by powerful persons.

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 171

As civilisation develops persuasion has succeeded to
compulsion, and the arts of propaganda to those of
force. Except when we are hard pressed, as in the
late war, we now mould men's minds instead of
coercing their bodies. But the change of method has
not diminished the power of the few to lead the many.
Very much the contrary ! In a modern community
the influence of leaders increases as the avenues of
propaganda multiply, while the effect of education in
giving people the power to read but not to criticise
what they read is to make them the dupes of un-
scrupulous advertisement.

It is still true, therefore, as it has always been, that
the actions of great bodies of men are determined by
the wishes of the ruling few. Now, the ends which most
rulers have wished to pursue have been in the main
harmful. Of the collective passions of dominant
individuals or groups, the strongest have historically
been the desire for wealth and power. These they
have sought to acquire and increase at the expense of
the wealth and power of rival individuals and groups.
Thus ambition coupled with fear and hatred have
been the dominant motives of most governing class
activities. For this reason the ends which people's
energies have been employed to secure, being the
ends of powerful individuals or groups, have been
in the main evil. But the motives from which they
have been led to put forth their energies have been
good, and it has been by appeals to the best rather
than to the worst that is in them that rulers have been
able to enlist their effective support. Most men will
put forth greater efforts in the cause of what they
believe to be right than they will do to advance their
own personal interests. They will also suffer more.
Hence, to get the most out of their followers, leaders
have always found it prudent to make out a good
moral case for the course of action proposed.

In the Middle Ages those respectable burghers who
tortured witches did so, not because they were cruel,

172 The Present and Future of Religion

but because they desired to save witches from the
clutches of the devil. The Inquisition persecuted and
burnt heretics, not because its priests took a delight
in distorted limbs and roasted living flesh, but be-
cause they were persuaded that it was only by this
means that the heretics would escape an eternity of
burning in hell. And in modern times it is by appeals,
not to their cupidity or to their cruelty, but to their
idealism that decent people are induced to further the
schemes of scoundrels, in the belief that they are
fighting for justice and liberty.

Enlightened persons frequently contrast the hun-
dreds of millions that a modern nation spends on
armaments with the paltry thousands that it is willing
to give to education, to housing, or to hygiene. But
the contrast is not confined to expenditure. Men will
not only give more money, they will give more time,
more energy, more ardour and enthusiasm to killing
and coercing their fellows than to educating them, to
housing them, to keeping them healthy, or to tending
them when they are sick. To the work of destruction
they will bring a nobility, a forgetfulness of self, a
truly religious spirit which the work of construction
is powerless to evoke. Thus, were it not for the good
in men, most of the evil in the world would have re-
mained undone.

Let us consider in this connection in a little more
detail the case of war. Of all the evil ends to promote
which men have given themselves, of all the false
ideals that have called forth their loyalty and self-
sacrifice, of all the bad things for the sake of which
they have done bad things from the best motives, war
is assuredly the worst. To kill men that you have
never seen and with whom you have no quarrel (the
enemy !) because other men whom you have never
seen and do not necessarily respect (the Govern-
ment) tell you that you ought to want to do so, of all
the strange activities of civilised manhood this assur-
edly is the strangest ! One knows not whether to be

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 173

the more appalled at its wickedness or amazed at its
folly. Yet war, as its apologists are never tired of tell-
ing us, has called forth more courage and endurance,
has enlisted in its service more nobility and unselfish-
ness, than any other human institution. The suffering
and sacrifice and uncomplaining heroism which war
alone has demanded, had they only been given to
causes which manhood deems ignoble, could in the
million years of man's existence have eliminated the
need for suffering anywhere within his sphere of
activity. War alone can make men trained in the
school of self-assertiveness forget the good of the
individual in the good of all. War is the one thing that
can unite men ; it is also the one thing they all know
to be wrong.

In the early days of the Great War there blew
through men the wind of a spirit which was the near-
est thing to religion that this age has seen. They en-
joyed that sense of fellowship and of community of
working for a common cause that in peace-time they
had not known, and, enjoying it, were ready for any
sacrifice. Each man thought of himself as a molecule
in the body of a community that was engaged in dis-
charging an obligation of honour. France was to be
saved, Belgium righted, freedom re- won, a soured,
crooked old world rid of bullies and reclaimed for
straightness and decency and good-nature. And,
fighting for these things, they felt themselves mem-
bers of a team ; they had got themselves happily
placed on a rope at which everyone else was tugging
his best as well as they. And from men, uplifted by
this common cause, enjoying this sense of fellowship,
all the worries and burdens of their isolation seemed
magically to have fallen away. There were no longer
any difficult choices to be made, no pass-books to
con, nobody's fate to settle, not even one's own. For
all was fixed and provided for down to the times of
one's rising and going to bed, the number of buttons
on one's coat, and the way of lacing one's boots.

174 The Present and Future of Religion

This vow of willing enslavement which every man
had voluntarily made, this allegiance to a cause tran-
scending his own interests, this recognition of a will
outside his own, had transformed him from a nervous
little clod of vanities and ailments, torn by desires,
weighed down by responsibilities and harassed by
conflicting claims, and given him the blitheness of
heart that comes of the tranquil acquiescence in the
merging of the self in something greater than the self,
the peace that passeth understanding that belongs as
surely to the youngest volunteer as to the mystic and
the saint. Lapped in the repose of utter obedience,
men sang in the morning, ate like hunters, and re-
discovered the instinctive joy in life of which modern
civilisation had robbed them. And they forgot that
they were individuals separated by class distinc-
tions ; they remembered only that they were work-
ing together on a common job. And, so remembering,
they attained happiness. Their spirits were cleansed,
their bodies rejuvenated ; they were twice the men
they were before.

It has been my lot in recent years to be brought into
contact as a teacher with many young men and
women in the early twenties. They have been for the
most part engaged in clerical work of minor import-
ance m Government or big business offices ; some
have been school teachers, others bank-clerks, others
salesmen, and there has been a sprinkling of young
manual workers. Their work absorbs but a small part
of their energies and satisfies none of their aspira-
tions. They regard it for the most part as task work,
as seven or eight hours of not too arduous drudgery
to be performed every day before they can begin to
live. Having performed it, they leave their offices,
fresh and eager, with energies untapped and appetites
unsated for what life may have to offer them.

Of religion in the ordinary sense of the word they
have none. In an average company of them, not one,
as I had occasion to mention earlier in this work, will

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 175

be found to believe in God, and scarcely any will feel
a need to believe.

But they have an appetite for intellectual adven-
ture ; they are not afraid of arduous intellectual
effort ; they are alight with generous enthusiasms,
and they have a great fund of goodwill. Fundamen-
tally they wish their neighbours well, and, keenly
alive to the evils of the society in which their lot is
cast, would not spare themselves in the effort to make
it better. In them is the same capacity for self-
sacrifice, for self-forgetfulness in some cause which is
recognised to be worth while, for social service and
for disinterested endeavour, which has been the
driving-force behind Bolshevism and Fascism, and
helped these movements to win through from un-
popularity to power.

But they do not subscribe to the political ideals
either of Russian Communism or of Italian Fascism,
and they are not organised. Meanwhile, they move
in groups and circles, are full of windy enthusiasms,
as soon forgotten as conceived, and beat about the
cage of life like any other wild thing newly captured.
To put it crudely, they don't know what to do with
themselves, and give to wireless, to sport, and to
sexual experimentation the energy that should be uti-
lised in the service of their fellows.

In a dozen years' time they will be middle-aged men
and women with families and homes ; their horizon
will be bounded by trivial cares, their aspirations
limited to the furthering of petty ambitions and the
achievement of an animal content, and in the end,
after a brief period of disillusion and despair relieved
perhaps by a series of sporadic love affairs, they will
settle down into a state of resignation, and, after a de-
cade of resentful recognition of the fact that they can-
not get what they like, will grow ultimately to like
what they get, having forgotten that they were ever
capable of Hiring anything better. In a word, they will
have ceased to be citizens and become units, whom

176 The Present and Future of Religion

nothing will any longer have the power of lifting up
put of the selfish little pit of vanity and desire which
is the self into something which is greater than the
self.

What I have described is commonplace enough ; it
is nothing more than the process of youth's subsid-
ence into middle age. I have seen it repeated again
and again, and, until we discover some means of tap-
ping and utilising for the good of society the political
impulse which wells up in our finer young men, it
will be repeated indefinitely.

In concluding this chapter, therefore, I want to ask
if it is not, after all, possible to conserve and utilise
this political impulse, which I have sought to identify
with one aspect of religion, to conserve and utilise it
not only for the good of society, but in the interests
of the individual himself ? If I am right, the aspect of
religion which expresses itself in our duty towards
our neighbour has a special importance to-day, and
for three reasons. First, the modern generation is, as
I have repeatedly pointed out, to all intents and pur-
poses without religious beliefs, and religion in the
ordinarily understood sense of the word plays no part
in its life. Religion has flourished in some form or
another among all peoples in all previous ages of the
world's history. This could not have been the case
unless it answered to a deep-seated longing, and pro-
vided expression for a universal need of human na-
ture. We cannot suppose that the present generation
is an evolutionary "sport," different from all pre-
ceding generations, in the sense that a desire and a
need previously so widespread as to be practically
universal have in it suddenly disappeared. If it is not,
it follows that the desire and the need must not only
exist, but remain to a large extent unsatisfied. In the
souls of young people to-day the decline of orthodox
religion has left a vacuum, and it ought to be filled.

Secondly, religion, as we have known it in this
country, has in the past provided a special channel for

Our Duty towards our Neighbour 177

the expression of what I have called the political im-
pulse, in the corporate life which has gathered round
the church, and still more the chapel, as its centre. In
this life humble people have been able to develop
their social natures in relation to their fellows, and to
realise something at least of what they have it in them
to be, sensing and in part fulfilling their duty, not to
their neighbour in the widest sense, but to their
neighbour in the community that centred round their
place of worship. In it they found opportunity for the
development of talents and the gratification of in-
stincts denied expression elsewhere. It is not too
much to say that the political capacity which in the
palmy days of nineteenth century democracy was at
once the pride and the distinction of the self-con-
scious citizen, was usually developed in some little
Bethel. Effort and endeavour that subsequently found
their way into trade union and co-operative adven-
tures were first put forth in chapel communities,
where men first learnt to trust, to help, and to work
with their fellows. 1 To-day these little worlds have
practically disappeared, and, where they persist, they
have lost vitality. They have subsided into tea-parties
and mothers' meetings ; they no longer afford an
avenue of expression for the political impulse, and too
often modern society offers nothing in their stead.
Yet some equivalent avenue of self-expression is
more necessary than it has ever been before, because
and this is my third reason of the deadening effect
of the modern State upon the individual. He is a cog
in a vast machine which grinds on to its appointee!
end irrespective of his wishes, and often, it seems,
indifferent to his weal or woe. He wants to feel that he
counts ; yet there is nothing that he can do, no point
at which he can take hold. Hence arises a sense of
bafflement and helplessness, and the political impulse
is thwarted and driven underground.

1 See Trevelyan's British History in the Nineteenth Century ,
p. 160.
MR

178 The Present and Future of Religion

The individual as a result tends to be an isolated
unit ; he has no sense of corporate responsibility, and
he misses the joy of working with others for a com-
mon cause. It is easy to see in retrospect why so many
men experienced a great and uplifting joy of fellow-
ship, a sense of exaltation new to them when training
with the army in the early days of the war. They were
experiencing for the first time the pleasure of shared
activities in what was thought to be a worthy cause.
Working both with and for their fellows, they liber-
ated the political impulse within them.

Many times I have been asked in these latter years
by young men and women, anxious to take a hand in
the job of making the world afresh, what they can
do. Faced by this question, I may have made some
vague reference to Wells's Open Conspiracy, I may
have urged them to attend W.E.A. Classes or to join
I.L.P. branches. But these things I have known it as
I advised them are mere makeshifts, and in the last
resort I have been compelled to admit that I do not
know. For and this is the tragedy of the young man
of to-day there is nothing that he can do.

This, then, is the task of religion in the modern
world, to capture the imaginations of young men and
women, as the Bolsheviks have captured them in
Russia and the Fascists in Italy ; to harness their ener-
gies and to utilise their enthusiasms, to find expres-
sion, in a word, for the political impulse as Com-
munism and Fascism have succeeded in expressing it,
but to do these things not for ends that are harmful,
but in the service of what is socially and politically
good. To translate into old-fashioned terminology,
religion must make of our duty towards our neigh-
bour an instrument to establish the Kingdom of
Heaven upon earth.

Chapter X
OUR DUTY TOWARDS GOD

Chapter X
OUR DUTY TOWARDS GOD

Our assurance of God is a consciousness of a relation rather than
a flawless proof of existence. l

I do not believe that our experience is the highest form of experi-
ence extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in just
the same relation to the whole universe as our canine and feline
pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-
rooms and libraries ; they take part in scenes of whose significance
they have no inkling. They are small tangents to curves of history
the beginnings and ends of which pass wholly beyond their ken.
So are we tangents to the wider things of life. W. JAMES.

I come now to a chapter which I find it very difficult
to write. In it I want to say in what for me the essence
of religion consists ; and for me the essence of religion
is mysticism. Now mysticism, from the very fact that
it is mysticism, cannot give an account of itself. If it
could, it would cease to be mysticism. This is un-
fortunate in a world which becomes increasingly ex-
planatory ; yet on reflection it is seen to be inevitable.
Language was invented to serve the purposes of hu-
man beings living in a material world of people and
things ; its intention is strictly practical. How, then,
can it be appropriately employed to describe the nature
and uses of a world containing neither ? And yet, if
mysticism means anything at all, if it is not the illegiti-
mate projection into a passive universe of the morbid
imaginings of the sexually starved, the psychologic-
ally perverted, or the merely insane, it must seek to
give some account of the venturings of the human
spirit into another world, and of such communion
with it as in his present state of evolution man has
been able to achieve.

Faced with the necessity of giving an account of
other-worldly experiences in words invented to serve

1 Professor Eddington, lecturing to the Society of Friends, May
1929.

The Present and Future of Religion

the purposes of daily life, the mystic, perforce, must
resort to the language of metaphor, in the hope that
some of his similes will strike a responsive chord in
others. This, on the whole, they have noticeably
failed to do. Nor should this failure cause surprise.
Mysticism, if I am right, is a private and personal
experience, as private and as personal as the tooth-
ache. As such it is incommunicable except to those
who have shared, in however slight a degree, experi-
ences of the same sort as those which it seeks to re-
cord. You cannot, it is obvious, convey what the sens-
ation of having the toothache is like to one who has
never had it.

For this reason the generality of mystics have con-
sistently talked what is to most of us manifest non-
sense. "It neither moves nor rests," they say, and
speak of "a dazzling darkness " or "a delicious des-
ert." Such contradictory statements must, it is
thought, be the vapourings of men bemused. And,
stigmatising them as such, we have been prepared
contemptuously to dismiss mysticism as moonshine,
when we ought to have contented ourselves with
regretfully remarking the fact that there was no
chord in our experience which could be made to
vibrate responsively to the mystic's utterance. Yet to
dismiss mysticism as nonsense because we cannot
comprehend the utterances of individual mystics, is
like supposing that all foreigners are mad because we
cannot understand what they say. It is mere intellec-
tual parochialism.

For the mystic, as for the artist, his revelation is a
psychological fact; like colour, or sound, heat, or
shape, it is undeniably a part of his experience ; it is
there ; it is real. Admittedly his experience is different
from that of most of us ; but so is an artist's obvi-
ously, since he records it or a dog's or a barnacle's.
And what claim, after all, has the world revealed to
the eyes of twentieth-century common sense to be
the sole type of reality ? It is negligible ! Science and

Our Duty towards God 183

philosophy combine to discredit the reality of objects
of everyday experience, dissolving chairs and tables
into a whirl of dancing electrons, mathematical events
in a spatio-temporal continuum, colonies of souls or
ideas in the mind of the observer. The world of com-
mon sense is a conventional construction, a legacy
from man's philosophical past ; common sense itself a
mass of dead metaphysics. Most of us, admittedly , find
it convenient to construct the common-sense world
alike because we have similar interests and similar
sense organs. But slightly change the condition of our
sense organs, and how differently it appears. We have
only, for example, to raise the temperatures of our
bodies five degrees, for sight and sounds, tastes and
smells, to acquire a new significance. Above all, the
world we touch, or rather that touches us, is radically
changed ; it is richer, more insistent, and more varied.
Yet because a man's temperature is temporarily above
normal, nobody would say that his sensations are not
really felt, or that the world they reveal to him has
not as much right to be called real as that which is ex-
perienced by bodies with temperatures at 98*4 Fahr-
enheit. It would indeed be a feat of parochialism
to which even common-sense should be unequal
to maintain that only that kind of world which
is perceived by the sense organs of human bodies
heated to a temperature of 98*4 is real. Even a count-
ing of heads discredits it ; most organisms, after all,
are cold blooded, and a frog's world is certainly not
ours. As with the frog's world, so with the mystic's.
Most mystics have been ascetics. Ascetic practices
are methods for inducing artificially a certain kind of
psychological and physiological condition. The con-
dition modifies the perceiving apparatus, and the
mystics' universe is accordingly changed. Changed,
and, it may be, deepened, widened, and enriched.
For men have found that the particular kind of ab-
normality that asceticism induces is one that enables
them to perceive not only a quantitatively larger, but

184 The Present and Future of Religion

a qualitatively richer world. It is to them a more ex-
citing world Because of the things it contains. Good-
ness, for example, and beauty, and, it may be, God.
Hence they seek to retain and continually to enjoy it.
They also try to tell us about it. On the whole, how-
ever, they have failed, not because what they have
tried to describe is not real, but because of the limita-
tions of language. If a frog could talk English, it is
most improbable that he could make us understand
the kind of world he inhabited. And where the great
mystics who have enjoyed experiences of the greatest
significance have failed, how am I, who am no mystic
at all, but merely a philosopher who refuses to be-
lieve that men of obvious religious genius, the saints,
the seers, and the sages who have commanded the
veneration of their fellows, are all of them either
dupes or cheats, liars or gulls to convey an idea of
that which, as it seems to me, they have tried to tell
us ? The task is a formidable one, especially since,
not being a mystic, I cannot claim the mystic's privi-
lege of talking nonsense in an emergency, in the hope
that some of it may mean something to somebody.
Yet, since for me the mystics hold the essential truth
of religion, I must make the attempt.

First let us take stock of the materials which our
previous discussion entitles us to use. Religion, I have
tried to show, cannot be interpreted or explained ex-
clusively in terms of its origins. In common with
other expressions of the human spirit, it must be ac-
counted the product of an evolutionary process. De-
veloping from humble beginnings, it has in the pro-
cess of development become more than its begin-
nings. Just as there is more in the human body than
in the germ cell, more in modern mathematics than
mere counting, more in modern science than super-
stition tinctured with curiosity, so is there more in
modern religion than the desire to propitiate the
forces of nature, to win God's good offices for the
tribe or to make him a scapegoat for its misdemean-

Our Duty towards God 185

ours. This "more," we have agreed, is to be inter-
preted teleologically, in terms, that is to say, of the
goal which religion may be seeking to realise and of
the ultimate manifestation of the fully developed
human spirit realising that goal. Thus, when we are
trying to gauge its significance in the present, infor-
mation about the origin and history of religion may
be not only irrelevant, but misleading.

One aspect of this "more" we have identified with
the disinterested desire manifested in young men and
women for the improvement of human life in this
world. For another, and a more important, we have
agreed to look to man's relation to another world,
and, we affirm, it is only in a fully developed religion
that we are likely to find it. No religion is yet, it is
obvious, fully developed ; it is possible, it is even
probable, that man's religious development lags be-
hind his development in other spheres, in that of
science, for example, or of art. Where, then, should
we look for a clue to the course which religion is to
take, and to the nature of the experience which
religion is likely to bestow, if it is not to the highest
and most noteworthy expressions of the human spirit
in other but kindred spheres ? What, then, are these ?

I can answer, but I cannot defend my answer. For
we enter here the realm of values, and entering it,
find ourselves committed to making judgments
of value which are in the last resort acts of faith. I
can recount what appear to me to be the highest
and most valuable manifestations of the human
spirit ; I can even construct a metaphysical system to
justify my choice 1 ; but, in the last resort, I must ad-
mit the possibility that my system may be noth-
ing but a rationalisation of my own tastes. When
we draw up our lists of great names, when we assign
values to the activities in virtue of which we call them
great, we enter the region of personal confession.

Here, then, let me make mine. Leaving religion
1 See my Matter, Life, and Value. (O.U.P. 1929.)

1 86 The Present and Future of Religion

temporarily out of account, as the subject to be pres-
ently discussed, I consider the creation of works of
art and literature, and the aesthetic appreciation of
such works, together with the intellectual activity of
the philosopher, the mathematician, and the scien-
tist when his science is pure to be the noblest ex-
pressions of the human spirit, and I consider that in
such men as Bach and Mozart, Plato and Hume,
Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Swift and Shaw, it has
risen to its greatest heights. My literary heroes are,
it will be observed, with the possible exception of
Shakespeare, all of them teachers ; their bent is di-
dactic. Castigating hypocrisy and stupidity, denounc-
ing cruelty and vice, mocking pomp and privilege,
exposing conventional morality as no morality at all,
they have sought to establish a new standard of right
and wrong, to indicate a new conception of conduct
by which, they have urged, it was men's duty to live.
In a word, they were geniuses in the sphere of morals,
endowed with an original vision of goodness, which
was at once subtler and more profound than that of
their contemporaries, just as the great artists have been
distinguished by their original vision of beauty, and the
great philosophers by their original conception of truth .
Putting the point in another way, we may say that life
has now evolved at a stage at which, in its most ad-
vanced representatives, it is intermittently aware of
what, for want of a better word, we call "value." The
great artist apprehends the value which we call
beauty ; the sage and the moralist the value which we
call goodness. Finding themselves, for reasons al-
ready given, unable to describe in language the nature
of this world of value into which they have insight,
they represent it as best they can in the medium most
appropriate to them. The artist incarnates beauty in
paint, or sound, or stone ; the sage seeks to manifest
goodness in the conduct of his daily life, and to lay
down principles and maxims by following which
others may do the same.

Our Duty towards God 187

And just as the artist "creates" 1 a beauty of which he
is unable to give any account, and the great teacher a
goodness which he is unable to describe, so we who
are not great artists or moralists, coming into contact
with the works of the former and the lives and teach-
ing of the latter, and apprehending the beauty which
the artist and the goodness which the sage have some-
how made manifest, are stirred and exalted, and are
moved to declare, while the fit is on us, that art is the
greatest thing in the world, or that the path which has
been pointed out to us is the road to salvation and to
follow it the only right way to living. Yet we cannot
tell why the symphony is beautiful, any more than we
can tell why the way of life is righteous. And, if
pressed by another to give reasons for our apprecia-
tion of the one or the obligation which we feel to
follow the other, we are at a loss to explain our excite-
ment or to defend the judgments which it has led us
to make. That, condemning or approving works of
art, we are unable when taxed to justify our judg-
ments is notorious ; we know what we like, we say
irritably, and are content to leave it at that. The more
sophisticated of us, it is true, talk of rhythm and
metre, of harmony and counterpoint, of colour masses
and perspective, of diminished sevenths and tonal
effects ; we invent, in fact, the language of art criti-
cism, which may be described as an elaborate device
for camouflaging the fact that we are merely reiter-
ating "that we know what we like."

As with beauty, so also with goodness ! We may ad-
duce a variety of reasons why we applaud the practice
of, for example, virtue ; that it promotes happiness,
that it enables men to live comfortably in society, that
it is advantageous to us personally, or that it qualifies
the virtuous man for a place in heaven ; but these are,
after all, merely descriptions more or less accurate of

1 1 put the word in inverted commas to indicate that it is being
used loosely. As will presently appear, the function of the artist is,
in my view, one of discovery rather than of creation.

i88 The Present and Future of Religion

some of the possible consequences of acting rightly ;
they are not the reasons why we admire right con-
duct. Hygiene promotes happiness ; an effective
police force enables men to live comfortably in
society ; gullibility in our friends is advantageous to
us personally ; and the judicious endowment of the
wings of hospitals is supposed to qualify men for
heaven. Yet we do not feel for these things the same
kind of respect as that which is aroused in us by the
practice of disinterested goodness.

Such descriptions are merely devices to disguise
from those who pride themselves on being reasonable
beings that they are totally unable to give reasons for
some of their strongest sentiments. Savages, who do
not share our wish to be thought reasonable, dispense
with them ; they venerate the good man, but are
without ethical theories. We are deeply moved by
"value" both in art and conduct, when it is made
plain to us ; our sentiments are, moreover, such as we
conceive to be a credit to us and wish to have re-
peated. Yet we are unable to say why it is that we
have them or to explain their significance to those
who do not. But we feel that those who do not in any
degree, however slight, share our sentiments, who
are blind and deaf to beauty in art, and unmoved by
nobility of character, are lacking in some faculty
which all adult human beings possess in so far as
they are adult and human, and that they are to that
extent not completely men and women.

But what has this to do with religion ? Precisely
this, that the apprehension of what I have called value,
not as attaching in the form of beauty to pictures or
music, or in the form of goodness to character and
conduct, but generally to the world as a whole, is in
my view the distinguishing characteristic of the relig-
ious consciousness. If we consider the state of mind
of people who are manifestly what we call religious,
we find that it involves an appreciation of something
as valuable. If we proceed further, and examine

Our Duty towards God 189

the religious consciousness in its highest manifes-
tation in the saint and the mystic, we find that it
always contains an element of worship, of worship
felt for the universe as a whole. This worship is an
appreciation of value ; it is or involves the feeling that
the universe is or contains an element of supreme
value which is at once the source and the sum of all
the other things which are recognised as valuable. To
this element of value the human mind naturally re-
sponds ; it excites adoration because it is felt to be
good ; it evokes worship because of its worth-ship.
Hence the religious attitude of mind is one which
contains an implicit recognition of the worth-while-
ness of things as a whole, not of pictures or music, of
conduct or character or truth, but of the universe
itself. And just as aesthetic experience is to be inter-
preted as our perception of the value called beauty as
manifested in pictures, or music, or natural scenery,
and our feeling of the supreme worth-whileness of
certain actions and characters is to be interpreted as
the recognition by the moral consciousness of the
value called goodness, so it is in mystical experience
that man has the clearest intimation of the value of the
universe considered as a whole.

I am brought here within measurable distance of the
confines of philosophy, and cannot proceed further
without trespassing beyond them. For I find that I
cannot indicate what I conceive to be the probable
future development of religion without setting forth
the particular view of the nature of the universe, of the
purpose of evolution and of the status and significance
of human life within the evolutionary process which
renders such a development probable if not inevit-
able. All this belongs to metaphysics, and is clearly
inappropriate in a book of this kind. I have endeav-
oured to expound the view in question elsewhere,
and to give the reasons for it. 1 Here I must content

l See Matter, Life, and Value, by the same author. (O.U.P.,
1929.)

igo The Present and Future of Religion

myself with briefly indicating the conception of the
universe as a whole to which it points, and ask the
reader to take on trust the considerations on which
it is based.

Life, then, I think of as an instinctive thrust or urge
appearing initially in an alien environment, a dead
world of chaos and blankness and matter. Life is
purposive, but its purpose is at first latent, and only
rises into consciousness in the course of life's evolu-
tion and development. Life evolves and develops by
infusing itself into the material universe, which breaks
it up, as a stream is broken by a line of rocks that lie
athwart its course, into an infinity of separate living
units. A living unit or organism is thus an isolated
current of a vast stream or reservoir of life, tempo-
rarily incarnated in the material medium which it
animates.

The living organism so formed, spurred to effort
and endeavour by the limitations imposed on it by its
material environment, evolves and develops, achiev-
ing new powers of skill and knowledge and under-
standing, and endowing itself with richer and more
varied faculties. At death the individual current is
merged again in the main reservoir of life, bringing
with it the equipment of knowledge, skill, and faculty
which in the course of its existence as an individual it
has acquired. Thus the stream of life as a whole is
being continuously enriched with the acquisitions
which its individual units bring to it. As a result it
emerges in each successive generation at a slightly
higher level than before, the acquisition of knowledge
and skill won by the efforts of the parents appearing
in the children as an endowment of innate faculties.
Thus each generation rises on the shoulders of the
last, while life as a whole develops and evolves exhibit-
ing a greater capacity for feeling, a greater power of
intellect, a more subtle and penetrating faculty of
insight and intuition at each level of evolutionary
progress which is successively achieved.

Our Duty towards God 191

In the course of its development life achieves the
faculty of consciousness, and comes at last to a know-
ledge of the fact, and a glimmering of the purpose, of
its evolution. It is in terms of this consciousness of
purpose, this vague intimation of a goal, which is now
for the first time beginning to be felt, that those ex-
pressions of the human spirit with which in this chap-
ter I am concerned are to be interpreted. The appre-
hension of the goal is at once their cause and their ex-
planation. For, in addition to the world of matter in
which life appears and evolves, there is, as I con-
ceive, a world of value to a knowledge of which life
aspires. The world of value is neither mental nor
material ; it is permanent, perfect, changeless, and it
is in some sense the goal of the evolutionary process
upon which life is engaged. It is only during the past
three thousand years, an infinitesimal fraction of evo-
lutionary time, that the existence of this world has
come for the first time to be dimly realised. But,
though we have assurance of its existence, we can
give but the barest account of its features. It contains
beauty, certainly, and goodness, and possibly truth ;
and in addition to these or, perhaps as their sum, an
element which mankind has come to know as deity.
The awareness of this world comes to us at first in
fleeting and uncertain intimations ; it is the source of
our feeling for works of art, wherein we apprehend
its images made by the artist in the medium of the
material world, of our feeling of duty and moral obli-
gation, or, rather, of that part of it which evades de-
scription in terms of its origin in tribal fears and of its
history in social observance, and of the sense of
reverence and worship which is the essence of the
mystical consciousness. Our apprehension of the
world of value is an evolved faculty, the latest that life
has succeeded in acquiring, and it is at present the
most uncertain, as it is the most precious, aspect of our
consciousness. The experience of beauty in painting or
music is the form in which this apprehension is most

192 The Present and Future of Religion

commonly vouchsafed to us. Bona fide ethical conduct
and the recognition and appreciation of such con-
duct are widespread but intermittent and are easily
obscured by passion and self-interest. Bona fide relig-
ious experience is perhaps the rarest of all. Neverthe-
less, it exists ; as life evolves it should grow com-
moner, and it is at once our duty and pur pleasure to
enlarge, as far as in us lies, our capacity for such ex-
perience. Widening and deepening our appreciation
of value, we further the process of evolution, for the
object of life's evolution, as I conceive it, is to free it-
self entirely from the world of matter, and to come to
rest, in full, perfect, and untrammelled contemplation
of the world of value.

Life is like a chrysalis, encased in the hard trappings
of an alien sheath ; one day it will emerge, and,
warmed by the sun of pure Being, will come to rest in
that contemplation of value which mystics have called
the vision of God. Meanwhile, as at all levels of evolu-
tion, there are "sports," precocious children of life on
the spiritual plane, in whom the future development
of the species is foreshadowed and anticipated. There
are the mystics who achieve in sudden flashes of illu-
mination that vision of the world of value which will
one day, if evolution goes aright, be the privilege of
all things that are living. It is from them that we de-
rive our knowledge of the world of value, for they
alone have had first-hand evidence that it exists.
Were it not for the mystics, religion and all that it im-
plies could be completely and satisfactorily inter-
preted in terms of its origins on the subjectivist lines
that I traced in chapter vii. But, given the fact of
mystical experience, we are enabled to recognise in it
the developed form of that vague feeling of awe and
reverence, that half-unwitting response to the uni-
verse as something worshipful, that in the ordinary
man does duty as the religious sense.

Hence religion, for the developed modern consci-
ousness, may be described as a vague and uncertain

Our Duty towards God 193

intimation of value in the universe, an intimation that
is accompanied by an emotion of reverence and awed
worship. This intimation logically involves, and in
practice includes, the conviction that life is purpos-
ive, in the sense that it is trying to develop a clearer
and fuller apprehension of what is now but im-
perfectly felt, and, for some of us, a recognition of the
fact that in the mystic this clearer and fuller appre-
hension has intermittently been achieved.

Hence the future of religion is for me one in which
the experience of the mystic will become the experi-
ence of the ordinary man.

So much by way of summary. Let us see to what it
commits us. We are committed to the view that, in
addition to the everyday material world in which we
live and move and evolve, the world of struggle and
change and imperfection, there is another world-
permanent, perfect, and changeless. Life evolves to a
fuller and more continuous knowledge of this world.
To its existence, and to the hold which it already be-
gins to exercise over men's imaginations, are to be
attributed the significance we attach to beauty, the
admiration we feel for moral goodness, and the sense
of awe, of reverence, and of worship which the saints
and mystics have called the awareness of God. What
follows ?

First that beauty is a non-human, absolute value,
which may be discerned and apprehended by man,
which may even be copied by him, but which cannot
be created by him. This is not the place for a discus-
sion of aesthetics, and I cannot here defend this highly
controversial statement. 1 But it may not be out of
place to mention what has always seemed to me the
most striking fact about our appreciation of art, a fact
for which any theory of aesthetics must make provi-
sion. Strike a dozen notes at random on the piano,
and you will evoke a series of vibrations in the atmo-

1 1 have tried to do it elsewhere. See my Matter , Life, and Value,
chap. vi.
NR

194 Z%* Present and Future of Religion

sphere, completely describable in terms of physics,
which in their turn produce a series of reactions in
the brain, which are theoretically completely describ-
able in terms of physiology. Arrange the same notes
in such a way that they form the statement of a Bach
fugjue, and they can thrill you to ecstasy. And no de-
scription in terms of physics or physiology, of etheric
waves or processes in the cochlea, can give the re-
motest explanation of the difference between the two
effects, or of why there should be a difference. Yet here
assuredly is something that requires an explanation.

And one explanation, perhaps the most satisfactory,
may be that the arrangement of notes in the fugue
has caught the likeness of some pattern belonging to
the world of value, so that in virtue of the likeness
the music becomes a window through which we
glimpse that world. Thus the artist plays the part
of a midwife, bringing to birth the forms and shapes
of the world of value in the material media of sound
and paint and stone. Art, then, has no concern with
this world except in so far as it can be used as a
medium for the representation of another one. Art is
imitative, but it imitates not the sounds and objects
of the material world, but the structure of the reality
that lies behind it.

Taking this view, we shall see in much modern art,
and indeed in most of the pictorial art that has suc-
ceeded the Renaissance, a misconception of art's
proper function. The Renaissance ushered in an age
of humanism. The human spirit embarked on a voy-
age of adventure, acquired a new culture and scholar-
ship, won a mastery over nature, and found a key to
unlock the secrets of the material universe. For a
time nothing seemed too difficult for its attempting,
nothing too high for its achieving. As the scroll of
humanity's triumphs lengthened and grew more
splendid, there was a glorification of the spirit that
achieved them. The human spirit was represented
as something of supreme importance. It was at once

Our Duty towards God 195

the standard and criterion of value and the centre of
the universe ; so much so, indeed, that the rest of the
universe came to be regarded as only there for the
purpose of putting the human spirit in its centre.
Any suggestion of a non-human, perfect, and perma-
nent world, to a knowledge of which the living and
the vital might aspire, but with which it could never
be identified, was denounced as treachery to the in-
finitely hopeful prospects of the human race. The
doctrine of evolution has lent countenance to this
view, suggesting that the evolving world of living
organisms is the only kind of world that exists, with
the result that our notions of value tend to identify it
with some future stage of the same process as that of
which we ourselves form part.

As it is only too obvious that no human thing here
and now is perfect, we place perfection at some dis-
tance, preferably infinite, along the road which we
are following. This is the essence of Romanticism in
literature, of Naturalism in ethics, and of Utopianism
in the social sciences. In literature we envisage an
impossible perfection in the ultimate development of
love between the sexes ; in ethics we conceive the
possibility of the immediate or gradual achievement
of perfection by the abolition of disciplines and re-
straints ; and in the social sciences by the removal of
certain specific inequalities and abuses.

It is part of the same tendency that in art we should
come to identify the beautiful with the objects of this
world in which we pass our everyday lives that is to
say, with the natural, the vital, and above all the hu-
man. Hence post-Renaissance art is essentially repre-
sentative in that it aims at giving as perfect a repro-
duction as possible of natural, living forms. This is to
degrade art to the level of photography. The function
of art, if I am right, is to give us the vision of another
world, not to photograph this one, and such a vision
is not to be achieved by a faithful representation of
the faces and forms that make our daily environ*

196 The Present and Future of Religion

ment. Before the Renaissance, this, which now seems
a heresy, was taken for granted. Realising the in-
significance of the human spirit in the vast immensity
of the universe, unimpressed with the importance of
themselves and their fellows, imbued in fact with the
sense of sin, it did not occur to the men of the pre-
Renaissance civilisations to identify perfection with
the future improvement of themselves. For them
there was another world, more real because more per-
fect than this one, before which and before the God
who inhabited it they abased themselves in humility
and awe. And so their art is imbued with a radically
different conception of the nature of beauty, and the
significance of the material objects in which it is
manifested.

The broad difference between pre- and post-Renais-
sance pictorial art may be described by saying, that,
while post-Renaissance art is a " vital' ' art in that it
takes and endeavours to communicate a delight in
human and natural forms, pre-Renaissance art is the
exact contrary to this. There is, for example, in By-
zantine pictures and mosaics no figure or shape that
is either natural or vital, nor is the pleasure we obtain
from them a pleasure in the reproduction of natural
objects or of human figures. There is rather a neglect
of the appearances of things and a preoccupation
with the formal qualities of lines and shapes. There
is, further, a definite impatience with whatever in the
appearance of living organisms and of natural objects
fails to exhibit such lines and shapes in the purity of
their abstract form. This impatience is the expression
of a fundamental indifference to the trivial and acci-
dental characteristics of living matter, and a searching
after an austerity, a rigidity, a perfection which vital
things can never have. We cannot suppose that the
mason who carved the face of an archaic figure did not
possess the skill to separate the arms and legs from
the body, or that the conventional forms of Egyptian
monumental sculpture spring from an incapacity to

Our Duty towards God 197

represent real ones. We can only conclude that these
deficiencies in realism reflect a particular kind of in-
terest, and that in Egyptian, Indian, and Byzantine
art, where everything tends to be hard and geo-
metrical, the representation of the human body is
often distorted to fit into a framework of stiff lines
and cubical shapes because the artist was interested
in the human body not for its own sake, but only in so
far as it exemplifies lines and shapes. Man, in short,
is subordinated in pre-Renaissance art to certain non-
human absolute values ; his form is never presented
intact, but distorted and mutilated in order that it
may be made to fit into certain abstract patterns
which arouse aesthetic emotion.

This attitude to natural objects reflects, in my view,
a right conception of art. It implies that the signifi-
cance of a work of art depends upon the extent to
which the artist has succeeded in representing in it
the beauty which, in virtue of his special insight, he
has apprehended in the world of value. It is only on
some supposition of this kind a supposition which
presupposes the existence of an order of being other
than that with which in daily life we are normally
acquainted that the peculiar effect and appeal of art
can be explained. It follows that art is meaningless in
the sense that the peculiar quality in which its appeal
resides, and to which its effect upon men's minds is
due, has no meaning in relation to the things of this
world, and cannot be explained in terms of the lan-
guage appropriate to the things of this world. It is for
this reason that in the last resort we are unable to say
why we like a work of art, what it is that provokes our
admiration, or what we mean by calling it beautiful.
Strictly speaking, art criticism should not exist.

Similarly with goodness. We all of us recopi^1giji|
certain actions ought to be done, and tJpK^jtfe
characters have what we call ethical
Various rational explanations are given $&
example, that we ought to perform a

198 The Present and Future of Religion

because it will promote the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, or that we approve of a good
character because it is sociably valuable. But if these
and similar explanations are correct, we ought to do
what is right and we approve of what is good not be-
cause what is right and what is good are valuable in
themselves, but for the sake of their consequences,
because, presumably, their consequences are valu-
able. It follows that any theory which asserts that the
justification for ethical conduct lies not in the conduct
itself, but in its results, is not, as it at first sight ap-
pears to be, a theory about what is good or right at
all, but about the expected consequences of what is
good or right, such consequences as, for example, in
the cases cited, happiness or social utility ; and it is
about these consequences that it affirms that they are
valuable. Ethics, if such theories are correct, appeals
not to our sense of value, but to our sense of pru-
dence.

That this is so can be seen by considering the
character of the appeal made by the ordinary moral
maxim. "Honesty," we affirm, "is the best policy,"
and, affirming it, imply that a sufficient cause for act-
ing honestly is not to be found in honesty itself. We
approve honesty, it seems, not for its own sake, but
for the sake of the consequences in the shape of ser-
enity, wealth, and social reputation which attend its
habitual practice. Or, again, we say, "God loves an
upright man," implying that we ought to be upright
not because of a considered preference for rectitude,
but because by being upright we shall win God's fav-
our. All religions have taken care to paint the respec-
tive consequences of winning God's favour and
arousing his anger in the liveliest colours, the result
being to transfer to the next world the incentive to
moral conduct which "honesty is the best policy"
supplies for this one.

Now goodness it is clear which is valued for the
sake of its results is not valued for itself at all. Yet

Our Duty towards God 199

directly we begin to rationalise about ethics, to ana-
lyse goodness, to say why we ought to do what is
good, or to explain what we mean by being good, we
find that what we are in fact describing is either the
incentive to be good or the results of being good ;
we are not, that is to say, talking about goodness itself
at all. A rational account of goodness could only be
given in terms of its results or its causes. To give
reasons why we should be good would imply that we
should be good because of the potency of the reasons
we have advanced, or, in other words, because of
something other than goodness. In the majority of
cases, this something other than goodness which is
advanced as a reason why we should be good turns
out on analysis to be the results or consequences of
being good ; reasons given for being good are that it
pays, that it will make us happy, or that God or other
people like it.

But if no rational account can be given of goodness,
if goodness itself is in essence non-rational, it follows
that it is not possible to defend goodness to a moral
sceptic, or to persuade a man who feels no moral in-
clination either to be good or to want to be good, by
advancing reasons why he should pursue goodness.
This conclusion seems to be convincingly borne out
by the experience of those who have engaged in
preaching or moral exhortation. Nothing, indeed, is
more remarkable in ethics than the failure of the
method of direct moral exhortation to produce effec-
tive results. For two thousand years teachers and
preachers have striven, by inculcating the principles
and precepts of Christianity, to mould men's charac-
ters and to improve their conduct ; yet we still have
our prisons, our judges, and our wars, and it remains
to-day, as it has done for two thousand years past, an
arguable question whether men are better or worse
than they were before Christianity was introduced.

It seems to follow that in the last resort goodness,
like beauty, is indefinable, and indefinable because it

200 The Present and Future of Religion

is essentially unreasonable. We can recognise that
certain actions are right and certain characters are
good, just as we recognise that certain smells are
pleasant and others unpleasant, and that is all that
there is to be said about it. That this is so can be
proved by five minutes' argument on any moral issue.
Let us suppose that we are endeavouring to persuade
a man to act in a way which we intuitively perceive to
be right. We bring forward, in the first instance, argu-
ments in support of the course advocated based on
utilitarian considerations : "Do this," we say, "if you
wish to prosper." "Do this, because so and so will ex-
pect it," or "Do this, if you don't want to be thought a
blackguard" ; thus, by appeals addressed to his pru-
dence or his fear, we seek to persuade him to the right
course. Let us suppose, further, that these appeals
fail, and fail because he attaches a different weight to
the considerations brought forward from that which
we have been inclined to place upon them, that, in
short, he takes a different view of his interests and of
what is best calculated to advance them. We are
thrown back on our last line of attack ; we bring up
our ethical reserves. "Do this," we say, "because it is
the only decent thing to do. Do it because it is right."
If this appeal, too, proves fruitless, what more can we
say ? Our plea may, of course, be rejected on the
ground that, although it is agreed that what we ad-
vocate ought to be done, the sacrifice involved is
greater than our friend finds himself able to make. In
this case the difference between us is not primarily an
ethical one, and does not, therefore, affect the issue
I wish to raise. But let us suppose that our friend
simply fails to recognise the moral obligation that we
seek to invoke ; that he does not share our view that
the action indicated is the only decent thing to do,
that he does not, in other words, feel that the con-
trary action is wrong. We can bring no further argu-
ment in support of our contention ; we can appeal
only to an ultimate and unanalysable intuition, and,

Our Duty towards God 201

since it is an intuition which ex hypothesi he does not
share, the appeal falls on deaf ears. If he does not see
that the action in question ought to be performed, we
can only abandon the hope of influencing him in the
regretful conviction that what our friend lacks is a
moral sense.

The conclusion is that the man with moral insight
apprehends certain values the value of goodness for
example, and its manifestation in conduct and charac-
ter which the man without it does not, just as the
man of aesthetic sensibility recognises certain other
values the nature of beauty and its manifestation in
shapes and sounds and lines which the man without
it does not. And, similarly, the man of religious in-
sight apprehends certain values which the man with-
out it does not. What values ? We can only answer,
the values which are what we call divine. But what do
we mean by values which are divine ? Certainly not
a personal, semi-human Creator. For the view I am
putting forward involves the conception of deity not
as the creator of this world, but as the occupant of
another, not as the source and origin of life, but as the
goal and end of its pilgrimage. To conceive of God as
the source of all that is, and therefore as the principle
to which we ourselves owe our being, is to raise the
insoluble problems considered in chapter vi. A per-
fect God could not, we said, feel the need to create,
a benevolent God made accountable for the occur-
rence of pain and evil, or an omnipotent God saddled
with the responsibility of deceiving his creatures.

The force of these considerations is, to my mind,
overwhelming. To acknowledge them is to acknow-
ledge the impossibility of a God who is conceived as
permanent and perfect owning any relation with a
world which is changing and imperfect, with the
changing and imperfect living beings that inhabit it,
or with the principle of life that animates them. Like
goodness and beauty, He must be a non-human
value, whose significance consists in His very unlike-

202 The Present and Future of Religion

ness to the life that aspires to Him. He may be known
by life, and, as life evolves and develops, he may be
known increasingly, the first fleeting intimations of
the saints and mystics reaching their consummation
in the continuous joy of unclouded contemplation.
But God Himself is unaffected by such contempla-
tion, and, though to achieve it may be the end and
purpose of life's evolution, He is unaware of the
movement of life towards Him. Nor can life enter into
communion with Him. God, it is obvious, if He is to be
an object worthy of our adoration, must be kept un-
spotted from the world that adores Him. To suppose
that the mystic can enter into communion with Him
is to suppose Him infected with the frailties and im-
perfections of the mystic ; to suppose that the saint
can become one with Him is to suppose that He can
become one with the saint. But, I repeat, the perma-
nent and perfect cannot be continuous with the im-
perfect and the changing ; nor could it, without
ceasing to be itself, enter into communion with the
imperfect and the changing. For this reason, though
the religious consciousness may hope to know God,
the religious man cannot aspire to become one with
that which he knows.

That a Being so conceived exists the mystics have
borne unanimous testimony. Either we are to write
off this testimony as the idle babbling of men beside
themselves with solitude and fasting, or we must ac-
cept it as evidence of a something beyond, into which
the vision of the mystic has penetrated. In this light I
for one am prepared to regard it. Mystical insight, if
I am right, is not just an exciting, subjective feeling,
subjective in the sense in which toothache is subjec-
tive, but an awareness of an object and a feeling of
reverence and exaltation in the presence of that ob-
ject. Mystical experience has, no doubt, its origin in
the primitive emotions of man's past ; it is the fruit
of training both of mind and body, and is the out-
come of vigorous mental and spiritual activity. Self-

Our Duty towards God 203

discipline, both intellectual and physical, and a con-
tinued striving after right living and purity of mo-
tive, prepare the soul for its illumination. But the
illumination itself is a thing apart, transcending the
origins from which it arose, and divorced from the
preparation of mind and spirit which has led up to it.
The origin of the mystical consciousness in primitive
emotion, the preparatory training, moral and spiri-
tual, of the soul are of this world ; but the illumina-
tion itself is a direct vision into another. It is the
window, the clearest as yet, through which man has
glimpsed reality, the avenue of the soul's approach
to God.

To write of this experience is difficult for one who
has not enjoyed it. Yet it is, in my view, the highest
development of the religious consciousness which
life has yet achieved, and in a book which 'attempts
to forecast the future development of religion some
account, however vague, must be given of its nature.
Its object, that of which it is the vision, must, if I
am right, remain unknown to us. The world which
mystics contemplate is revealed only to the mystics ;
but of the character of the experience itself we may
obtain some inkling, by considering its closest ana-
logue in that of the ordinary man namely, that inti-
mation of the world of value which comes to us in
aesthetic experience.

What, then, are the characteristics of intense aes-
thetic experience ? There are, I think, two. In the
first place it brings with it a sense of freedom and re-
lease ; in the second, it is fleeting and evanescent.
As instruments of evolution, we are in our day-to-
day existence mere channels through which flows
restlessly and unceasingly the current of life. We are
a surge of impulses, a battlefield of desires, over
which we can only at length and after a lifetime of
setback and of struggle obtain a degree of mastery
through the achievement of a self-discipline, which is
itself the outcome of desire made rational. Wishing,

204 The Present and Future of Religion

fearing, craving, hoping, willing, we may never, ex-
cept in the rare moments of aesthetic enjoyment, be
at rest. We must be for ever doing and stirring, im-
proving and making better, meddling and changing.
It is one of the paradoxes of our nature that we can-
not even love a thing without seeking to change it,
and by changing to make it other than what we love.
The greatest lovers of mankind have been those who
have spent their lives in the endeavour to save man-
kind ; and, since they have always insisted that man-
kind could not be saved except it repented, to save
man was to alter him. A man cannot love a woman
without seeking to mould her nearer to his heart's
desire, or a child without trying to form it upon him-
self. We cannot love the countryside without pru-
ning and clipping, smartening and tidying, making
meaningful and useful what has achieved beauty by
haphazard, and imposing order upon the sweet dis-
order of nature. We cannot love a tree even, or a
stone, but sooner or later we must be pruning the tree
or chipping a piece off the stone. We do these things
because of the overmastering impulsion of our wills ;
yet were it not for our wills we should cease to be.
Thus, for so long as we live, we must conform to the
bidding of the life within us, so that, however we
love and whatever we love, it can be for a few mo-
ments only, and to buy off our will for these moments
we have to relinquish what we love to it, to change
and alter as it needs must for the rest of our lives.
This, then, is the law of our being as units of the
stream of life, that we should be for ever changing
ourselves, and seeking to change the world around us.
But this law, which is the law of life as evolving to an
end, is not the law of life which has achieved the end.
And so there is even now an exception to the law, in
virtue of which we partake, if only for a moment, of
the rest and freedom which it is the object of life to
win permanently and to win for everything that is
living. In the appreciation of music and of pictures

Our Duty towards God 205

we get a momentary and fleeting glimpse of the na-
ture of that reality to a full knowledge of which the
movement of life is progressing. For that moment,
and for so long as the glimpse persists, we realise in
anticipation and almost, as it were, illicitly, the nature
of the end. We are, if I may so put it, for the moment
there i just as a traveller may obtain a fleeting glimpse
of a distant country from a height reached on the way,
and cease for a space from his journey to enjoy the
view. And since we are for the moment there, we ex-
perience while the moment lasts that sense of libera-
tion from the drive of life, which has been noted as
one of the special characteristics of aesthetic experi-
ence. We who are part and parcel of the evolutionary
stream stand for the time outside and above the
stream, and are permitted for a moment to be with-
drawn from the thrust and play of impulse and desire,
which are our natural attributes as evolutionary tools.
For so long as we enjoy the vision of the end, life lets
us alone. We feel neither need nor want, and, losing
ourselves in contemplation of the reality beyond us,
we become for the moment selfless.

But if, in aesthetic experience, we are like travellers,
resting on our journey and refreshing ourselves with
a view of the goal to which our steps are directed, we
may not rest for long. The Life Force has created us
for a purpose, and it cannot afford to have us dally-
ing by the roadside. Indulgence in aesthetic experi-
ence is, from the point of view of the Life Force, a
form of idling, a playing truant when we should be
at school. " Biologically speaking," says Mr. Roger
Fry, "art is a blasphemy. We were given our eyes
to see things and not to look at them." 1 Thus life
takes care that at an early age we shall attain to a con-
siderable ignorance of the visual appearance of ob-
jects. We see and we are meant to see only so much of
them as serves the purpose of living. To see them
whole and to see them round as the artist does, to see
1 Fry, Vision and Design, chap, iv., p. 47.

206 The Present and Future of Religion

them, above all, as combinations of significant forms,
is a kind of seeing for which those who are preoccu-
pied with the business of living cannot afford the
energy or the time.

We are all familiar, to take the matter at its lowest,
with the limitations of the sense of smell. Agreeable
odours please us only fitfully ; the sensation comes as
a surprise, a pleasing shock, and is quickly gone. If
we attempt to hold it by deliberately smelling a frag-
rant flower, we begin to have a sense of failure as
though we had exhausted the pleasure, keen as it was
a moment ago. For this failure to retain there is no
doubt a physiological basis ; a nerve is tired and re-
quires an interval of rest before it can be freshly stim-
ulated. But for me the distinction between psycho-
logical and physiological occurrences in the last resort
breaks down. Each type of occurrence resolves itself
into a form of awareness, and so, when we turn to
what passes for a more spiritual because more devel-
oped faculty and consider the sense of sight, we find,
though in a less marked degree, the same evanescence
in aesthetic pleasure. We look long and steadily at a
thing to know it, and the longer and more fixedly we
look, the better, if it engages the reasoning faculties ;
but our aesthetic pleasure cannot be increased or re-
tained in this way. To gaze fixedly at the most beau-
tiful object in nature or art does but diminish the
pleasure. Practically it ceases to be beautiful, and
only recovers the first effect after we have given our-
selves an interval of rest. If we would get the keenest
visual pleasure we must look, merely glancing as it
were, and look again, and then again, receiving at in-
tervals the image in the brain even as we receive the
perfume of a flower ; and the image is all the brighter
for coming intermittently.

That it should be at once unexpected and inter-
mittent is characteristic of our pleasure in the beauti-
fulfin whatever form it is presented. Beauty always
takes us as it were by surprise, whether it comes to us

Our Duty towards God 207

as a sudden view of a landscape, as a harmony of
shape and line, or it may be as music heard by chance
from an open window in the street. Nor is the reason
far to seek. ^Esthetic apprehension is unconditioned
by considerations of space and time, and unrelated to
the purposes of life ; for this reason we are not
allowed to indulge it overmuch. And so, before we
are even fully assured that the vision of beauty is ours,
the Life Force catches us up and thrusts us back into
the whirlpool of want and need, of striving, loving,
and fearing which is life. And this no doubt is the
reason for the fleeting and ephemeral nature of even
the most lasting aesthetic experience ; to this it owes
its unsatisfactory and tantalising character. There is
no sky in June so blue that it does not point forward
to a bluer ; no sunset so beautiful that it does not
awaken the thought of a greater beauty. The soul is at
once gladdened and disappointed. The veil is lifted
so quickly that we have scarcely time to know that it
has gone before it has fallen again. But during the
moment of lifting we get a vision of a something be-
hind and beyond, which passes before it is clearly
seen, and which in passing leaves behind a feeling of
indefinable longing and regret.
That these are the characteristics of intense aesthetic
experience is, I think, undeniable, and, if I am right in
regarding mysticism as conveying a direct view of a
world which in art we approach by roundabout ways,
they may be conceived to be in an even greater degree
the characteristics of mystical experience. The vision
of that to which the mystic gives the name of God
has, then, these two qualities ; it brings a sense of
freedom and selflessness, but it is also fleeting and un-
certain. So much we may, I think, fairly affirm. Yet
of the characteristics of the object revealed,of the God
whom mystics enjoy, we can give no account. For
mysticism, as I pointed out at the beginning, is from
its very nature debarred from giving an account of it-
self. In affirming that mystical experience is at once

ao8 The Present and Future of Religion

exalting and exciting, and that it brings a feeling of
emancipation from self, the mystics are unanimous ;
but they have not succeeded in conveying its con-
tent. The God of whom they speak may be nothing
but a generalised name for the world of value, a sym-
bol to denote the element of perfection and perma-
nence in the universe. He may be beauty and good-
ness and truth taken in sum, or these may be but
partial aspects of Him, different facets of His nature.
He may, in other words, be all the elements of value
taken together, or a unity of which they are but partial
revelations. We cannot tell. All that we are entitled to
say is that deeper than the complex of feelings which
has gone to the making of religion, the humility and
reverence, the sense of an obligation to mankind, the
feeling of imperativeness and acting under orders
which has traditionally been interpreted as divine in-
spiration, lies the sense of a mystery half revealed, of a
hidden beauty and glory, of a transfiguring vision in
which common things lose their solid importance,
and become a thin veil behind which the ultimate
reality of the universe is dimly seen. It is this sense
which has been the source of all that is noblest in reli-
gion in the past, and which, if religion is to survive, it
must seek to refine and to extend in the future.

Our argument may be summarised as follows : (i.)
Art and morals can only be adequately explained on
the assumption that in aesthetic and ethical experi-
ence we are brought into direct touch with a world of
value, (ii.) In mystical experience man has achieved
his most direct and continuous vision of this world,
(lii.) As life evolves the vision becomes clearer and the
insight deeper, (iv.) Religion, while assuring us of the
existence of this world, should teach that way of life
by means of which we may be brought to a fuller and
more continuous knowledge of it. It is the function of
religion, in other words, to help forward the process
of evolution.

Chapter XI
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

OR

Chapter XI
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

Rejection of a creed is not inconsistent with being possessed
by a living belief. 1

In this concluding chapter I want to answer as briefly
as I can the question with which I began this book :
What are the conditions which a religion which is to
survive in the modern world must satisfy ? The an-
swer has already been implied in the discussions of the
two previous chapters, and I have only to bring to a
focus and to summarise the conclusions which have
been reached.

The considerations which are relevant to an esti-
mate of the prospects of religion are of two kinds,
positive and negative. There are the conditions which
religion must fulfil and the anachronisms from which
religion must abstain. I will take the negative ones
first.

I. What things, then, must a religion which is to
survive not do ?

(a) It must not teach beliefs about the nature of the

Ehysical universe which science has shown to be
dse.

(b) With regard to the non-physical universe, it
must not teach as absolute truths dogmas which
cannot be known to be either true or false, but which
there is no reason to think true.

Condition (a) rules out all religions of the Funda-
mentalist type. For these, unless civilisation is to
collapse and the world to relapse into savagery, there
can be no future. Whatever, on general grounds, may
be the prospects of such a relapse, the vogue of Fund-
amentalism in the form in which it has broken out in
the United States should, in any event, be short lived.

1 Professor Eddington, lecturing to the Society of Friends, May
1929.

212 The Present and Future of Religion

In this connection it is not without significance that
an authoritative rebuff should have recently been de-
livered to His more injudicious supporters by the
very Being whom their unsolicited testimony has so
palpably embarrassed. I read that on the day on
which Kentucky approved by a referendum a law to
prohibit any reference to evolution in its schools, a
baby was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a tail
seven inches long. 1 This Providential intervention by
the principal in an acrimonious dispute seems to be
intended to convey the plainest possible hint in the
most tactful possible way.

The hint, I gather, is on the whole being taken.
Despite the strength of the old-fashioned Fundamen-
talists who are entrenched in the southern and
western States, Modernism is making a steady and
irresistible advance in the religious life of the United
States. If I may for the last time invoke the assistance
of one of those statistical investigations by means of
which Americans endeavour to find out what each
other thinks, I should like to quote some figures pre-
pared by the Rev. G. H.Betts, Professor of Religious
Education in the North Western Modernist Uni-
versity, tabulating answers by 500 Protestant clergy-
men and 200 students in theological seminaries.

No less than 94 per cent, of the students believed
that the theory of evolution is consistent with the idea
of God as a creator, and 61 per cent, of the ministers
thought the same. Only 28 per cent, of the ministers
believed in hell as an actual place or locality, and n
per cent, of the students. Less than half of the minis-
ters (47 per cent.) believed that the Creation occurred
in the manner and at the time recorded in Genesis.
The discovery that in the United States, and appar-
ently in the less civilised parts of the United States,
more than half the clergymen questioned believe that

l The tail, I gather, has been removed and sent to the John
Hopkins University at Baltimore, where it will be kept to show
that a referendum, though it may deny, cannot evade, the truth.

The Future of Religion 213

the first book of the Bible is untrue is as gratifying
as it is surprising.

Fundamentalism, it seems clear, is on the wane.

Condition (b) is not less important. Religions have
included in the past a definite set of dogmas with
regard to such matters as the purpose of existence and
the government of the universe, in which those who
professed the religion were required to believe. The
dogmas were unsupported by evidence, could not be
verified by experience, and related to matters with
regard to which the truth was unobtainable. The
Christian religion has been particularly rich in dog-
mas of this kind. For example, Jesus 's relation to God
and to the Holy Ghost has been expounded in a num-
ber of highly complex theories, and Unitarians and
Nestorians, Eutychians, Aryans, and Monophysites
have maintained with considerable emphasis diverg-
ent views, which have been the occasion of intermin-
able disputes. These views were put forward not as
hypotheses which were more or less probable, but as
absolute truths, the acceptance of which was claimed
by their adherents as indispensable to salvation. The
view which finally prevailed finds expression in that
monument of lucidity the Athanasian creed, and this,
presumably, holds the field to-day.

Now, it is just possible that one of these views may
be true ; but it cannot be known to be so. If it be
asserted that its truth is revealed to insight, then it
may be authoritative for the elect to whom the in-
sight has been vouchsafed ; but it cannot claim au-
thority over those to whom it has not. The unofficial
sentiments on the matter of the average devout
Christian to-day are presumably somewhat as fol-
low : "I believe in God and try to live like Jesus, but
I do not know exactly what the relation between
them is, nor do I very much care." To insist that he
must know, and must care, is either to drive him
away from the Church, or to insist on his becoming a
hypocrite, if he chooses to remain.

214 Th* Present and Future of Religion

A creed for the modern mind is merely a working
hypothesis. It is always possible that it may be true,
and it may, therefore, oe provisionally entertained
until something better turns up ; but'it cannot be
known to be true, is probably false in certain particu-
lars, and is not to be made a test of faith. These con-
siderations apply not only to the obsolete creeds of
the past, but to any others by which they may be
superseded. A creed "in harmony with the thought
of to-day," or a religion based on the discoveries of
modern science, will be as dangerous as the Athana-
sian creed more dangerous, in fact, for it will take
more people in if it is accepted as a statement of
truth and not as a working hypothesis. For a creed
in "harmony with the thought of to-day" will be out
of harmony with that of to-morrow, and a religion
based on the discoveries of modern science will be
discredited by the discoveries of a science still more
modern. But while creeds and religions which make
creeds a test of faith may be discredited by science,
religion in the sense described in the last chapter will
remain unaffected. Naturally, since it is concerned
with something different.

It is, indeed, precisely because, in spite of doctrin-
aires and zealots, it has always been vaguely felt that
the Church of England stood for something more
than creeds, that it survives to-day. There is a tradi-
tion in this Church, a tradition supported and en-
riched by a long line of English clergymen (particu-
larly country clergymen), that what a man believes is
less important than the way he behaves, that an
acceptance of metaphysical notions about the Trinity
is less essential than an endeavour to live according
to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, that
the custom of baptism matters more than its doctrine,
and that the religious benefits which the poor man
derives from the church where his fathers wor-
shipped, and the sacred piece of turf where they lie
buried, are but little dependent on a clear under-

The Future of Religion 215

standing of the Liturgy or the Sermon. As for the
clergyman, an insight into men's characters becomes
him better than an interest in their opinions.

In the course of this book I have had some hard
things to say of the Church. It is the pleasanter to be
able to record one's unstinted admiration for this type
of country clergymen. It is because something of
their tradition still lingers in the Church to-day that
it commands the reverence and respect of many who
disbelieve most of the dogmas upon which it officially
insists, and is likely to survive its Nonconformist
rivals with their more doctrinaire tradition. But only
for a time. The religion of the future has no place for
metaphysical truths that can be formulated as abso-
lute dogmas. We know too much about the universe
to-day to think that we know anything for certain.
Yet the modern man's intransigeance in the matter of
formulated creeds does not imply the end of religion
as in the last chapter I have conceived religion. "Reli-
gion," said Professor Eddington, lecturing to the So-
ciety of Friends, "for the conscientious seeker is not
all a matter of doubts and self-questioning. There is a
kind of sureness which is very different from cock-
sureness." I agree. But it is not the sureness which
can be stated in words or finds expression in explicit
beliefs.

II. On the positive side the religion of the future
will have two functions to perform. The first con-
cerns man's relation to his fellow-men, the second his
relation to the universe as a whole. A religion which
the modern man can take seriously must seriously
address itself to the needs of the time. If the Western
world paid any attention to the religion it professes,
it would scrap its armies and navies, close its prisons,
sack its judges, and adopt some form of economic
Communism. These, no doubt, are Utopian projects,
but that it should make some attack upon the major
evils of our day should not be too much to ask of a
religion. In so doing it would appeal to and provide

21 6 The Present and Future of Religion

expression for the political impulse which, in those
who wish to help their fellows and to improve the
world in which they live, is now thwarted and frus-
trated by the size of the modern community. The
course of events since the war has seemed at times to
suggest that the days of democracy may be num-
bered, and that the future rests with disciplined
bodies of determined men and women, resolved to
take hold of the affairs of society and to run them not
as dominant groups have run them in the past, to
promote their own interests, but in what they believe
to be the interests of society as a whole. That they
should be mistaken as to the nature of these interests,
and should be led to devote their energies to the ser-
vice of ends which are harmful, is their inevitable
heritage from man's tragic past, which it should be
the function of religion to replace by a new concep-
tion of what is socially valuable. To believe that one
not only knows what is right, but is justified in im-
posing one's conception on others, is natural to the
young and vigorous, and the course of history has
been largely determined by the childish attempt to
make others think as we think, value what we
value, and behave as we behave ; inevitably, since
the race itself is still in its infancy. It has been one of
the chief hindrances to man's advancement that a
mature and civilised outlook, and a just conception
of what is valuable, has only been achieved at a time
of life when the energy and will to make them effec-
tive are lacking.

It should be the business of religion to substitute for
the ends that have inspired most of men's collective
actions in the past the desire for wealth or power,
the fear of rivals and the wish to dictate loyalties, to
determine beliefs and to prescribe conduct the val-
ues of the mind and the spirit, and to mobilise the
energies which have been hitherto used to keep back
the evolution of the race to help it forward. Wells's
book, The Open Conspiracy, is a religion in this sense,

The Future of Religion 21 ^

and the religion of the future will appeal to the ideal-
ism of the young and vigorous in proportion as it
embodies this or some similar programme of measures
recognised to be for the good, not of individuals, nor
even of nations, but of mankind.

In the second place, religion must concern itself
with man's relation to the universe as a whole. To
comfort and console man in the face of the apparent
indifference of the physical world, to assure him of
the underlying worth-whileness of things, has always
been its most important function, upon the perform-
ance of which its prospects in the future will chiefly
depend.

Bearing in mind the origins of religion in primitive
fear and need which we discussed in chapter vii., we
shall naturally expect some part of the role which
religion plays in the life of the modern man to be de-
termined by these origins. Man is still clogged by the
heritage of his past, and cannot yet hope to emanci-
pate himself from the needs which it engenders. In
all of us there are vestigial elements of those primitive
emotions which first prompted the savage to make
gods in order that he might propitiate them, a sense
of helplessness before the face of nature, a feeling of
insignificance before the vastness and indifference of
the universe, and a need to find compensation for the
slights and injustices of this life in the egotistically
conceived glories of another. In our moments of
weakness these emotions revive ; to all of us comes
the need for comfort and consolation, to all of us the
desire to be important and to feel esteemed. And to
all of us, therefore, the primitive side of religion must
continue at moments, however faintly, to appeal,
strengthening and sustaining us, and giving us the
assurance, albeit illusory, of protection and guidance
in the present and welcome and consideration in the
future. Nor is religion when it comes in this guise to
be condemned, merely because some of us have out-
grown it. At its best the religion of the past, as, com-

ai8 The Present and Future of Religion

forting and strengthening, it ministered to the needs
from which it sprang, was a fine thing and brought
happiness into humble lives. It alone has had the
power to take men out of and lift them above them-
selves, and under its influence rough men and weary-
hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudi-
mentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the
past, lifted their imaginations above the sordid de-
tails of their own narrow lives, and suffused their
souls with the sense of a pitying, loving Presence,
sweet as summer to the houseless needy.

Such has been the role which religion at its best has
played in the life of the common man. For those who
have been unfitted by circumstances of training and
intelligence for this simple faith, for the educated
modern mind, at once enquiring and disillusioned,
critical of the dogmas of orthodox religion and con-
temptuous of the Churches, yet conscious neverthe-
less of a pointlessness and purposelessness in life,
which spring from a sense of spiritual deficiency, it is
clear that religion, if it is to survive, must come to
mean something more than this.

Twentieth-century man I have represented as the
victim of an unconscious need to believe. How is that
need to be satisfied ? It can be satisfied only if he can
be somehow assured of the fundamental worth-
whileness of the universe. It is the function of relig-
ion, as I conceive it, to give him this assurance. To do
this it must make him realise that the scientific ac-
count of the physical universe popular to-day, or
rather yesterday (for the most modern physics has
made the world at once less alien and more mysteri-
ous), is neither final nor exhaustive. The universe is
not a pointless, purposeless collocation of atoms ;
evolution is not a mere movement of material ; life
is not a chance passenger straying across a fund-
amentally alien universe ; value not a mere projection
of the human spirit upon the empty canvas of a fea-
tureless world. The material universe may, it is true,

The Future of Religion 219

be a chance aggregate of physical entities, but this
material world is moulded and infused by a spirit of
life. Moreover, it is not the only world, but behind
and beyond it is the world of value, permanent and
perfect. Our conceptions of beauty, ol goodness, and
of God are not, therefore, figments of desire and
wraiths of the imagination, will-o'-the-wisps to lead
astray the fond and the foolish, but life's recognition
in us, its most advanced representatives, of the exist-
ence of this world, and acknowledgment of its com-
pelling power.

For life is not a pointless journey, but a crusade
through the world of matter in search of the world of
value and perfection, and evolution is the process of
life's development as it seeks to equip itself for the
apprehension of that world. It rests with us, life's
most advanced representatives, to carry forward that
process still further. Hence we are not isolated units
mattering to nobody but ourselves, but participators
in an undertaking which is greater than ourselves,
and individuality is not an end in itself, but a means
to an end which transcends it.

The spiritual loneliness of the agnostic's universe re-
flects unfavourably upon men's lives, generating in
the individual the belief that it matters to nobody but
himself how his life is lived. Just as the size of the
modern State makes him feel that he no longer counts
as a citizen, so does the indifference of the modern
universe make him feel that he no longer counts as a
man. Hence men lose their sense of value because
value in a universe so conceived has no meaning, and
personal satisfaction comes to be regarded as the sole
criterion of what is worth while. But we have not yet
evolved at a level at which we can dispense with the
conceptions of duty and obligation, and the acknow-
ledgment of no responsibility but to the self makes
not for freedom, but for self-imposed slavery. A life
so conceived is a tired and tiring life, slavery to the
need for individual pleasure being the most burden-

220 The Present and Future of Religion

some of all the forms of servitude to which men and
women have hitherto subjected themselves. For once
we fall into the mercantilist error of judging life solely
as a commerical speculation, with pleasure on the
profit side and pain on the debit, we are bound to find
it a failure. Taken as isolated units, we are nervous
little clods of wants and ailments perpetually present-
ing our cheques for pleasure at the bank of existence,
and first indignantly and then querulously abusing
life for refusing to honour them. Like children, we
demand that our fellows shall take us at our own valu-
ation and minister to our self-importance ; and, be-
cause they refuse, we turn cynic and pessimist, con-
demn existence as a bad investment and life as a
meaningless adventure in a purposeless universe.
This is the plight of the generation now coming to
maturity, which, having successfully revolted against
authority, is finding itself increasingly disillusioned
with the results of its revolt. It has knocked the
bottom out of the spiritual universe and sent the
gods packing ; but it has still to come to terms with
the need which created them. The solicitations of
this need, thwarted and driven underground, are
responsible for much of the world weariness which,
as we saw in chapter v., is so characteristic of the
age.

Religion, as I have defined it, can rescue us from
this impasse. Intimating that the meaning of this
world must be sought outside it, it bestows, never-
theless, a meaning upon the world. Assuring us that
our highest faculties and noblest inspirations have
their origin in a world which is not known to the
senses, it invests them with significance. They are to
be interpreted, it tells us, as premonitions of the goal
of life's pilgrimage, yet tells us also that it is only
through our efforts that life can go forward to that
goal. Hence it offers us a commission in the army of
life, bidding us keep our energies fresh, our appetites
keen, our faculties at cutting edge in its service.

The Future of Religion 221

Nor should this appeal to our pride of faculty be
despised. Religion, as the mystics have conceived it,
calls us to a way of life which the modern world has
forgotten, but of which it stands, nevertheless, in ur-
gent need. To keep our faculties keen and our senses
fresh, to keep the emotions in check, the spirit un-
clouded, and to look upon the world with a pure eye
is not only the direct approach to another world, but
the best passport to happiness in this one. To put the
matter at its lowest, it is good worldly as well as other-
worldly policy.

Ascetics, if their accounts are to be believed, per-
ceive a more exciting world, and perceive it more in-
tensely than do the rest of us ; they make their sacri-
fice, and they have their reward. But it is not neces-
sary to be an ascetic to make existing exciting. It is
necessary merely to follow certain rules, by the recog-
nition and codification of which mankind has evolved
its morals and its religions.

Morals properly regarded are rules of spiritual hy-
giene, to be cultivated in the interests of intenser
living. Sloth, avarice, lechery, gluttony, and anger are
hygienically unsound ; by stirring the mud of the
passions they dull and trouble the mind. Cultivation
of the more elementary sides of our nature inhibits
the activity of the higher, and by keeping the mind in
agitation prevents us from realising the potentiality
for intense spiritual experience that we hold within
ourselves. Sin may, in fact, be defined as the refusal to
make the most of our possibilities. To sin is to neglect
life's challenge to realise all that we have it in us to
be ; it is to be content with life at a lower level when
we might have enjoyed it at a higher ; it is to opt for
the dull and obvious pleasures of traditional experi-
ence, rather than for the intense and exciting exist-
ence of the spiritual pioneer. Moral health has been
wrongly conceived as a form of limitation and restric-
tion ; rightly regarded it is, like bodily health, the
attainment of a state of fitness, a fitness of the spirit

222 The Present and Future of Religion

to register the finer shades of experience, and, like a
well-trained instrument, to evolve new and more ex-
quisite harmonies of thought and feeling.

On the religious side, mysticism at its lowest may be
regarded as a recognition of the fact that, for those
who live in a state of agitation, certain kinds of se-
rene and lasting happiness are impossible. The highest
intellectual and creative processes of the human mind
are also its most intense experiences. Whatever in-
terferes with them interferes with our pleasures. But
the pool cannot reflect the sky when the water is
troubled, and mysticism is the practical and syste-
matic cultivation of that mental quietness in which
alone the serenest and most intense kind of happiness
may be realised ; it is the constant pursuit of that
happiness, and as such may be regarded as a set of
rules for the attainment of psychological health. This,
as I say, is to put the matter at its lowest, but we
should be wrong to overlook the significance of the
intensity of the experience which mysticism brings.
This intensity is bound up with the mystic's concep-
tion of the universe, a conception with which, as it
seems to me, religion must in future increasingly be-
come identified, and to which it must increasingly
subscribe. It is the conception, which only religion
can give us, of a goal and purpose for life's pilgrim-
age, of a world permanent and perfect, beyond the
changes and struggles of the life around us, of which,
in the recognition of goodness and the appreciation of
beauty, we are already beginning to receive our first
faint intimations.

It is to this world that religion offers us a direct
approach, and in mystical insight reveals it to us,
albeit obscurely and in fleeting glimpses, as the goal of
our pilgrimage, and revealing, bids us love what it
reveals ; I say love, but in the last resort our love, at
its highest flood, rushes beyond its object and loses
itself in the divine mystery of its object.

APPENDIX

Answers to a Questionnaire prepared by the Nation on Religious
Belief, published in the Nation October i6th, 1926.
(i) Answers by readers of the Nation.

Question

Numbers answering

Doubt-

Yes

No

ful or no

answer

i . Do you believe in a personal God ?

743

1,024

82

2 . Do you believe in an impersonal , pur-

posive, and creative power of

which living beings are the vehicle,

corresponding to the Life Force,

the ilan vital, the Evolutionary

Appetite, &c. ?

700

892

257

3 . Do you believe that the basis of real-

ity is matter ?

S o6

1,063

280

4. Do you believe in personal immor-

tality ?

807

882

1 60

5 . Do you believe that Jesus Christ was

divine in a sense in which all liv-

ing men could not be said to be

divine ? . .

659

1,136

54

6. Do you believe in any form of Chris-
tianity ?

945

796

1 08

7. Do you believe in the Apostles'

Creed? ..

393

i3i3

H3

8. Do you believe in the formulated

tenets of any Church ? . .

453

1,265

131

9. Do you voluntarily attend any reli-

gious service regularly ?

798

1,021

30

10. Are you an active member of any

Church ?

666

M39

44

ii. Do you accept the first chapter of

Genesis as historical ? . .

US

1,685

49

12. Do you regard the Bible as inspired

in a sense in which the literature

of your own country could not be

said to be inspired ?

523

1,268

58

13. Do you believe in transubstantiation?
14. Do you believe that Nature is indif-

76

i>73i

4*

ferent to our ideals ?

i ,08 1

435

333

224 Appendix

(2) Answers by Daily News readers.
Question

Numbers answering

Doubt-

Yes

No

ful or no

answer

i. Do you believe in a personal God ?

9>99 r

3,686

'366

2 . Do you believe in an impersonal pur-

posive, and creative power of

which living beings are the vehicle,

corresponding to the Life Force,

the (Ian -vital, the Evolutionary

*

Appetite, &c. ? . .

4,714

6,467

2,862

3. Do you believe that the basis of real-

"/ T

fi /

ity is matter ?

3.049

8,338

2,656

4. Do you believe in personal immor-

tality ?

10,161

3,i78

704

5. Do you believe that Jesus Christ was

divine in a sense in which all liv-

ing men could not be said to be

divine ? . .

9.549

4,179

35

6. Do you believe in any form of Chris-

tianity ?

10,546

2,879

618

7. Do you believe in the Apostles'

Creed?

7.484

5>7i

1,488

8. Do you believe in the formulated

tenets of any Church ? . .

7,299

5,296

9. Are you an active member of any

Church?

8,796

4,896

35

10. Do you voluntarily attend any reli-

gious service regularly ?

10,025

3,822

196

ii. Do you accept the first chapter of

Genesis as historical ? . .

5,333

7,488

1,222

12. Do you regard the Bible as inspired

in a sense in which the literature

of your own country could not be

said to be inspired ?

8,95

4,635

13. Do you believe in transubstantiation?

MS 6

12,147

440

14. Do you believe that Nature is indif-

ferent to our ideals ?

5.713

4,987

3,343