What Is and What Might Be

E >> Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be

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It may indeed be doubted if men have ever been so non-religious as
are at the present day the inhabitants of our highly-civilised and
thoroughly-Christianised West. At any rate the absence of a central
aim in human life has never been so complete as it is now. Most men
are content to drift through life, toiling for the daily bread which
will enable them to go on living, yet neither knowing nor caring to
know why they are alive. There is a minority of stronger and more
resolute men who devote life with unwavering energy to the pursuit of
what I may call private and personal ends. Thus the man of business
lives for the acquisition of riches; the scholar and the scientist,
of knowledge; the statesman, of power; the speculator, of excitement;
the libertine, of pleasure; and so forth. Few are they who ever
dream of devoting life as a whole to the pursuit of an end which is
potentially attainable by all men, and which is therefore worthy of
Man as Man. The idea of there being such an end has indeed been
almost wholly lost sight of. Those among us who are of larger
discourse than the rest and less absorbed by personal aims, ask
themselves mournfully: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?
Is life worth living? and other such questions; and being unable to
answer them to their satisfaction, or get them answered, resign
themselves to a state of quasi-stoical endurance. That religion
cannot be expected to answer these questions--the very questions
which it is its right and its duty to answer--seems to be taken for
granted by all who ask them. Religion, as it is now conceived of,
is a thing for priests and ministers, for churches and chapels, for
Sundays and Saints'-days, for the private devotions of women and
children, for educational debates in Parliament, for the first lesson
on the time-table (9.5 to 9.45 a.m.) of a Public Elementary School.
The "unbeliever" is eager to run a tilt against religion. The
"non-believer" is content to ignore it. The "believer" is careful to
exclude it from nine-tenths of his life. It is to this pass that the
gospel of salvation by machinery has brought the most "progressive"
part of the human race.

The phase of non-religiousness through which the West is passing has,
we may rest assured, a meaning and a purpose. At the meetings of the
Catholic Truth Society it is customary for the speakers to deplore
the steady relapse of Christendom into paganism, which is going on
before their eyes. As the Church had things her own way for ten
centuries or more, these complaints on the part of her champions are
equivalent to a confession on her part of disastrous failure. Why is
the Church, after having evangelised the West and ruled it for a
thousand years, allowing it to slide back into paganism? The answer
to this question is that she herself is unwittingly paganising it.
I mean by this that, without intending to do so, she is compelling
it to choose between secularised life and arrested growth. Were a
growing tree encircled with an iron band, the day would surely come
when the tree, by the force of its own natural expansion, would
either shatter the band or allow it to cut deep into its own stem.
The growing consciousness of Humanity has long been encircled by a
rigid and inadequate conception of God. The gradual secularisation of
the West means that the soul of man is straining that particular
conception of God to breaking-point: and it is infinitely better that
it should be broken to pieces than that its iron should be allowed to
sink deep into the soul.

The secularisation of contemporary life means this, and more than
this. It means the gradual handing back of Man's life to the control
of Nature,--of Nature which is as yet unequal to the task that is
being set it, owing to its having been through all these centuries
identified with its lower self, taught to distrust itself, and
otherwise misinterpreted and mismanaged, but which, in obedience to
the primary instinct of self-preservation, will gradually rise to
the level of the responsibility that is being laid upon it. With the
further secularisation of Man's life, the need for religion to make
effective the control of Nature, by pointing out to it its own ideal
and so co-ordinating and organising all its forces, will gradually
make itself felt, and the regeneration of religion will at last have
begun.

* * * * *

For many centuries the current of religious belief in the West was
almost entirely confined to the one channel of Catholic Christianity.
There the mighty river pursued his course, "brimming and bright and
large," till the time came when, with the gradual loss of his
pristine energy--

"Sands began
To hem his wintry march, and dam his streams
And split his currents";

Side channels were formed, and grew in number; and though Catholicism
is still the central channel for the moving waters, the river has now
fallen on evil days, and "strains along," "shorn and parcelled," like
the river of the Asian desert--

"forgetting the bright speed he bore
In his high mountain cradle."

Of the many side streams into which Western Christianity has split,
the majority may be spoken of collectively as Protestant.
Protestantism claims to have liberated a large part of Christendom
from the yoke of Rome; and it is therefore right that we should ask
ourselves in what sense and to what extent it has brought freedom
to the human spirit. The answer to this question is, I think, that
though Protestantism has fought a good fight for the _principle_ of
freedom, it has failed--for many reasons, the chief of which is that
it began its work before men were ripe for freedom--to lead its
votaries into the path of spiritual life and growth. Confronted by
the uncompromising dogmatism of Rome, it had to devise a counter
dogmatism of its own in order to rally round it the faint-hearted
who, though eager to absolve themselves from obedience to the
despotism of the Church, yet feared to walk by their own "inward
light." In making this move, which was not the less false because
it was in a sense inevitable, Protestantism may be said to have
renounced its mission. That it has done much, in various ways, for
human progress is undeniable; but the fact remains that it has
failed to revitalise Christianity. Its master-stroke in its struggle
with priestcraft--the substitution of "faith" for "works" as the
basis of salvation--has done little or nothing to relieve the West
from the deadly pressure of Israel's philosophy. For faith, as
Protestantism understands the word, is the movement of the soul,
not towards the ideal end of its being but towards an alleged
supernatural transaction,--the redemption of the world by the
death of Christ on the Cross. Gratitude to Christ for his love and
self-sacrifice may indeed be an effective motive to action, but faith
in the efficacy of Christ's atoning sacrifice is no guide to conduct.
The inability of Protestantism to deduce a scheme of life from its
own master-principle of salvation by "faith" has compelled it, in
its desire to avoid the pitfalls of antinomianism, to revive in a
modified form the practical legalism of the Old Testament. The
Protestant desires to show his gratitude to Christ by leading a
correct life; but his distrust of his own higher nature compels him
to go to some external authority for ethical guidance; and as he has
repudiated the authority of the supernaturally-inspired Church, he
is compelled to have recourse to the supernaturally-inspired Bible.
Hence the traditional alliance between Protestantism and the Old
Testament, in which the path of duty is far more clearly and
consistently defined than in the New. And hence the singular fact
that Calvinism, which is the backbone of Protestantism, and which in
theory, and even (at times) in practice, regards "works" as "filthy
rags," finds its other self in Puritanism, which is in the main a
recrudescence of Jewish legalism in the more strictly _moral_ sphere
of conduct.

It is owing to its alliance with the legalism of Israel, that
Protestantism has been in some respects an even greater enemy of
human freedom than Catholicism, and has on the whole done more than
the latter to narrow and maim human life. The strict legalist tries,
as we have seen, to bring the whole of human life under the direct
control of the Law; and when he finds, as the Puritan did in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that whole aspects of life have
in point of fact escaped from the control of religion and won from
the latter a tacit acceptance of themselves as secular, he not
unnaturally tends to regard these non-religious aspects of life as
"carnal," and therefore as unacceptable to God. Hence the antipathy
of the Protestant, in his seasons of Puritanical fanaticism, to
art, music, the drama, and other noble fruits of the human spirit.
Catholicism has found itself compelled to tolerate the secular
activities of the layman; Protestantism, while tolerating those
activities by which man earns his daily bread and which may be spoken
of collectively as "business," has from time to time waged war
against all the developments of human nature which are neither
spiritual (in the narrow and rigid sense of the word) nor obviously
useful, and has sought to extirpate the corresponding desires from
the heart of Man. On the more artistic side of human life, it has
done as much to impede the growth of the soul as Catholicism has
done on the more intellectual side; and through its influence on
character it has done as much to harden the fibre of the soul as
Catholicism has done to relax it, the tendency of both religions
being to destroy that elasticity of fibre which mediates between
hardness and flabbiness, and which has its counterpart in vigorous
health and strength.

The truth is--but it is a truth which Protestantism is apt
to misinterpret, and which Catholicism finds it expedient to
ignore--that religion is not a branch or department of human life,
but a way of looking at life as a whole. Indeed, it is of the essence
of religion (as has been already suggested) that it should look
at life as a whole, and so be able to look at each of its details
in the light of that supreme synthesis which we call Divine. And
the religion which sanctions, and by its own action necessitates,
the division of life into two branches--the secular and the
religious--has obviously missed its destiny and betrayed its trust.

* * * * *

A brief summary of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way
for the next. The movements of higher thought in the West have been
dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the
average man. As a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic.
Enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he
instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil,
the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a
great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given
antithesis. Confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained
it by the story of Creation. Confronted by the twin mysteries of sin
and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the Fall. From the
story of the Fall he has passed on to the doctrine of original sin,
to the belief that Nature in general, and human nature in particular,
is corrupt and ruined, and therefore intrinsically evil. Shrinking
from the hopeless prospect which this belief opens up to him, he
has found refuge in the conception of another world,--of a world
above and beyond Nature, a world of Divine perfection from which
information and guidance can at God's good pleasure be doled out
to Man. For a "supernatural revelation" (as theologians call this
sending of help from God to Man) special instruments are obviously
needed,--a special People, a special Scripture, a special Lawgiver,
a special Prophet, a special Church. Hence has arisen the idea that
certain persons, certain castes, certain institutions have a monopoly
of Divine truth and grace, and are therefore in a position to dictate
to their fellow-men how they are to bear themselves if they wish to
be "saved," what they are to believe, what they are to do. From this
the transition has been easy to the further idea that salvation is
to be achieved by blind and mechanical obedience,--by renouncing
the right to follow one's own higher nature, to obey one's own
conscience, to use one's own reason, to map out one's own life. In
order to induce men to yield the obedience which is required of them,
their lower instincts have had to be appealed to (for the higher,
ruined by the Fall, have presumably ceased to operate),--their desire
for pleasure by the promise of Heaven, their fear of pain by the
threat of Hell. And in order that their lives may be kept under
close supervision and their merits accurately appraised, an
ever-increasing stress has had to be laid on what is outward,
visible, and measurable in human life, as distinguished from what
is inward and occult,--on correctness in the details of prescribed
conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of
salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised
scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's
nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the
channel of soul growth--the only channel that leads to spiritual
health, and therefore to "salvation"--becomes gradually obstructed,
with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to
dissipate themselves and run to waste, or to make new channels for
themselves,--channels of degenerative tendency, the end of which is
spiritual death.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] By "self-satisfaction" I mean satisfaction with the
existing system _as a system_. That strenuous efforts are being made
to improve the system, within its own limits, I can well believe. But
the system itself, with the defects and limitations which are of its
essence, seems to be regarded as adequate, and even as final, by
nearly all who work under it.

[2] 1862 to 1895 A.D.

[3] The _Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ_, by Dr.
Emil Schuerer.

[4] In its extreme form legalism tends to bring about that
ruin of human nature which it starts by postulating; for, by
forbidding Man's higher faculties to energise, it necessarily arrests
their development, and so makes it possible for the lower faculties
to draw to themselves an undue share of the rising sap of Man's
life.

CHAPTER II

EDUCATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE

The God of popular theology has been engaged for more than thirty
centuries in educating his child, Man. His system of education has
been based on complete distrust of Man's nature. In the schools which
Man has been required to attend--the Legal School under the Old
Dispensation, the Ecclesiastical School under the New--it has
been taken for granted that he can neither discern what is true,
nor desire what is good. The truth of things has therefore been
formulated for him, and he has been required to learn it by rote and
profess his belief in it, clause by clause. His duty has also been
formulated for him, and he has been required to perform it, detail by
detail, in obedience to the commandments of an all-embracing Code, or
to the direction of an all-controlling Church.

It has further been taken for granted that Man's instincts and
impulses are wholly evil, and that "Right Faith" and "Right Conduct"
are entirely repugnant to his nature. In order to overcome the
resistance which his corrupt heart and perverse will might therefore
be expected to offer to the authority and influence of his teachers,
a scheme of rewards and punishments has had to be devised for his
benefit. As there is no better nature for the scheme to appeal to,
an appeal has had to be made to fears and hopes which are avowedly
base. The refractory child has had to be threatened with corporal
punishment in the form of an eternity of torment in Hell. And he has
had to be bribed by the offer of prizes, the chief of which is an
eternity of selfish enjoyment in Heaven,--enjoyment so selfish that
it will consist with, and even (it is said) be heightened by, the
knowledge that in the Final Examination the failures have been many
and the prize-winners few.

And as, under this system of education, obedience is the first and
last of virtues, so self-will--in the sense of daring to think and
act for oneself--is the first and last of offences. It is for the
sin of spiritual initiative--the sin of trying to work out one's
own salvation by the exercise of reason, conscience, imagination,
aspiration, and other spiritual faculties--that the direst penalties
are reserved. The path of salvation is the path of blind, passive,
mechanical obedience. To deviate even a little from that path is to
incur the penalty of eternal death.

* * * * *

As Man is educated by his father, God, so must the child be educated
by his father, the adult man. If the nature of Man is intrinsically
evil, the child must needs have been conceived in sin and shapen in
iniquity. If Man, even in his maturity, cannot be trusted to think
or desire or do what is right, still less can he be so trusted when
he is that relatively immature and helpless being, the child. If
the adult man has to be told in the fullest detail (whether by a
formulated Law or by a living Church) how he is to conduct himself,
still greater is the need for such or similar direction to be given
to the child. If the adult is to be "saved" by strict and mechanical
obedience, and by no other method, still greater is the need for
such obedience on the part of the child. If a system of external
and quasi-material rewards and punishments is indispensable in the
education of the adult, still less can it be dispensed with in the
education of the child. These _a fortiori_ arguments are strong; but
there is a stronger. The child will develop into the adult, and he
cannot too soon be initiated into the life which, as the adult, he
will have to lead. The process of educating the child is not merely
analogous to the process of "saving" the man. It is a vital part
of it. For childhood is the time when human nature is most easily
moulded; and the bent that is given to it then is, in nine cases out
of ten, decisive of its ultimate destiny.

It is clear, then, that if Man is to be "saved" by a _regime_ of
mechanical obedience, his education in his childhood must be based on
the same general conception of life and duty. This means, in the
first place, that the child must be brought up in an atmosphere of
severity. The God of the Old Testament--the Deity whose _nimbus_
overshadows the life of the West--combines in his own person the
functions of law-giver, governor, prosecutor, judge, and executioner.
His subjects are a race of vile offenders, whose every impulse is
bad, and whose nature turns towards evil as inevitably as a plant
turns towards the light. As he cannot trust them to know good from
evil, he has had to provide them with an elaborate code of law; and
he has had to take for granted that, left to themselves, they will
break his commandments, and find pleasure in doing so. From the very
outset, then, his attitude towards them has been one of suspicion and
rising anger. He is always on the look-out for disobedience, and he
is ready to chastise the offender almost before he has had time to
commit the offence. His pupils, brought up in an atmosphere of
suspicion, and taught from their earliest days to disbelieve in and
condemn themselves, can scarcely be blamed for living _down_ to the
evil reputation which they have unfortunately gained. To persuade a
man that he is a miserable sinner is to go some way towards leading
him into the path of sin. Systematic distrust paralyses and
demoralises those who live under it, and so tends to justify the
cruelty into which it too readily develops. The penalties which God
has attached to the sins which he may almost be said to have provoked
Man to commit, are so terrible and unjust that if the fear of them
has not robbed life of all its sunshine, the reason is that their
very horror has numbed Man's imagination, and made it impossible for
him even to begin to picture to himself their lurid gloom.

In the West men have loyally striven to reproduce towards their
children the supposed attitude of their God of Wrath towards
themselves. From very tender years the child has been brought up in
an atmosphere of displeasure and mistrust. His spontaneous activities
have been repressed as evil. His every act has been looked upon with
suspicion. He has been ever on the defensive, like a prisoner in the
dock. He has been ever on the alert for a sentence of doom. He has
been cuffed, kicked, caned, flogged, shut up in the dark, fed on
bread and water, sent hungry to bed, subjected to a variety of
cruel and humiliating punishments, terrified with idle--but to him
appalling--threats. In his misery he has shed a whole ocean of
tears,--the salt and bitter tears of hopeless grief and helpless
anger, not the soul-refreshing tears which are sometimes distilled
from sorrow by the sunshine of love. But of all the cruelties to
which he has been subjected, the most devilish has been that of
making him believe in his own criminality, in the corruption of his
innocent heart. In the deadly shade of that chilling cloud, the
flower of his opening life has too often withered before it has had
time to expand. For what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to
demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years--to
harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive,
to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon
themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to quench the joy of
their hearts, to numb their sympathies, to cramp their expansive
energies, to narrow and darken their whole outlook on life. All this
the cruelty of his seniors would do to the child, even if he had not
been taught to believe in his own inborn wickedness. But that belief,
with which he has been indoctrinated from his earliest days,
necessarily weakens his power of resisting evil, and so predisposes
him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows in his
heart. We tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as
such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided
education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads over his
congenital depravity, and thank God that we believe in "original
sin."[5]

In the next place, if Man is to be faithful to his model, he must
bring up the child in an atmosphere of vexatious interference and
unnatural restraint. That Man himself has been brought up in such an
atmosphere in both his schools--the Legal and the Ecclesiastical--I
need not take pains to prove. What he has suffered at the hands of
his Schoolmaster--the God of Israel (and of Christendom)--he has
taken good care to inflict on his pupil, the child. Such phrases as:
"Don't talk," "Don't fidget," "Don't worry," "Don't ask questions,"
"Don't make a noise," "Don't make a mess," "Don't do this thing,"
"Don't do that thing," are ever falling from his lips. And they are
supplemented with such positive instructions as: "Sit still," "Stand
on the form," "Hold yourself up," "Fold arms," "Hands behind backs,"
"Hands on heads," "Eyes on the blackboard." At every turn--from
infancy till adolescence, "from early morning till late in the
evening"--these "dead and deadening formulas" await the unhappy
child. The aim of his teachers is to leave nothing to his nature,
nothing to his spontaneous life, nothing to his free activity; to
repress all his natural impulses; to drill his energies into complete
quiescence; to keep his whole being in a state of sustained and
painful tension. And in order that we may see a meaning and a
rational purpose in this _regime_ of oppressive interference, we must
assume that its ultimate aim is to turn the child into an animated
puppet, who, having lost his capacity for vital activity, will be
ready to dance, or rather go through a series of jerky movements, in
response to the strings which his teacher pulls. It is the inevitable
reaction from this state of tension which is responsible for much of
the "naughtiness" of children. The spontaneous energies of the child,
when education has blocked all their lawful outlets, must needs force
new outlets for themselves,--lawless outlets, if no others are
available. The child's instinct to live will see to that. It
sometimes happens that, when the channel of a river has been blocked
by winter's ice, the river, on its awakening in Spring, will suddenly
change its course and carve out a new channel for itself, reckless of
the destruction that it may cause, so long as an outlet can by any
means be found for its baffled current. It is the same with the river
of the child's expanding life. The naughtiest and most mischievous
boy not infrequently develops into a hero, or a leader of men. The
explanation of this is that through his very naughtiness the current
of soul-growth, which ran stronger in him than in his school-mates,
kept open the channel which his teachers were doing their best to
close. Even Hooliganism--to take the most serious of the periodic
outbursts of juvenile criminality--resolves itself, when thoughtfully
considered, into a sudden and violent change in the channel of a
boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels)
of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational
repression. His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last
despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself,
before it finally gives up the struggle for active existence.

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