Mountain Meditations, and some subjects of the day and the war

The number of “unbelievers” is growing. There are certain doctrines which we cannot believe because they violate our reason, or our sense of justice and fair play. Centuries ago it may have been possible to believe them: that is no concern of ours. To each age its own mind and its own enlightenment. What is more disquieting to the rulers of orthodoxy is that we do not care, that we cannot believe in certain doctrines. Doctrines are at a discount just now. The Church may quarrel over Kikuyu, or the Apostolic Succession, or the Virgin Birth, or marvel at the new possibility of a canon of the Church of England preaching a sermon in the City Temple. We feel that it is infinitely more important that a few experiments in practical Christianity should be imposed on the world. Religion in the past has been conceived as essentially a matter of suppressing the intellect, submitting to oppression and injustice, learning to bear patiently the inflictions of Providence. Religion in the future will demand all the attention which our feeble intellect can offer it, and the conscious and willing co-operation of mankind in the realization of God's plans for a regenerated world.

Whilst the Churches addicted to ritualism and literalism decline, the Brotherhood movement gains in force and influence. Men meet to give united expression to their religious impulses. They meet for prayer and worship, but never without immediate bearing on some great social question or object. Opinions are freely expressed. Heterodoxy in details of faith is rampant, and is no obstacle to Christian fellowship. To the Sunday afternoon and evening gatherings of the Brotherhood flock the many to whom the Bible is still a source of spiritual food, and who demand a plain and practical interpretation of its teachings. An impromptu prayer, in which the keynote is the loving fatherhood of God, and its bearing on the brotherhood of man, precedes a homely address or sermon, closely packed with allusions to social and political questions. Or the address is entirely secular; a downright unbeliever has been invited to give the audience the benefit of his knowledge or experience, in connection with some great movement for the betterment of the world. There is a disinclination to criticize anybody's religious views, provided he shows by his acts and life that he is part of the new Ministry of Humanity. Here we have the pivot of the change which is overtaking the forms of religious expression.

Men are no longer content to regard this world as a hopeless place of squalor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abode which cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised and forsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken in body. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longer compensates for the glaring faults of this. This is no sign of the weakening of the spiritual hold on reality. It is a sign of the spiritualization of the values of life. It is a sign that we begin to understand that we are spirits here, now, and everywhere, that we see that time in this world and the way we employ it have a profound bearing on eternity. There is no reason, in the name of God or man, why we should be content to let this world remain a place of torment and foolishness, if we have reached a point when we can see the better way. There is a certain type of religious mind which dreads the idea of social reconstruction, on the assumption that we shall not long for heaven if conditions here below are made less hellish.

There is also a type of churchman whose finer sensibilities are sorely tried by the secular occupations of nonconformity in general. If once or twice in their lives they should stray amongst Congregationalists, Baptists, or Methodists, they come away disgusted at the brutal directness with which social evils are exposed in the light of the word of the Lord. They complain of the general lack of finesse and Latin; the licence of the pulpit has usurped the reverence of the altar. It is perfectly true that statements are sometimes made in nonconformist pulpits which are bald and offensive to the ear of scholarly accomplishment. But the complaint of secularization is singularly inept. Nothing could be more secular in the way of complacent acceptance of the worldly reasons for leaving awkward questions alone than the attitude of this type of critic.

The future life of Christianity is safely vested in the free Churches. The freedom will be progressive, and may possibly embrace a vista of unfettered interpretation and application of Christian knowledge which will be as remote from the dogmatism of to-day as is our present attitude from the intolerance which kindled the Inquisition and made possible the night of St. Bartholomew. Religious intolerance has already lost three-fourths of its hold on faith. Catholic will now slaughter Catholic without the stimulus to hostility afforded by heretical opinions. Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably hear His call to action.

Some will see in the decay of intolerance an indication of the general evaporation of Christian articles of faith, and the possible loss of identity in some new form of religion. There is no danger. No religion can live in opposition to the evolution of the human spirit. It must be sufficiently deep to meet the most exacting need of individual religious experience, and it must be sufficiently broad and elastic to correspond to the ever-changing phenomena of social evolution. Christianity has this depth and this breadth. Two parallel lines of its development are clearly discernible at the present time. One is the transubstantiation of faith in social service; the other is a demand for individualized experience of spiritual realities. It is becoming more and more difficult to believe a thing simply because you are told you ought to believe it, or because your father and grandfather believed it. Authority in matters religious is being superseded by exploration. He who feels with Swinburne that

and he for whom space is peopled with living souls mounting the ladder to the throne of God, share the desire to experience the truth. Mysticism is passing through strange phases of resurrection. Its modern garb is made up of all the hues of the past, and, in addition, contains some up-to-date threads of severely utilitarian composition. The number of those who claim direct experience of spiritual verity as against mere hearsay is greater than ever. The discovery of the soul is attracting students of every description. The powers of suggestion, and the creative possibilities of the subconscious mind, have opened up new fields of religious experiment and adventure. The art of controlling the mind, so as to make it immune against the depredations of evil thought, or fear, or worry, is pursued by crowds of amateur psychologists who delight in the happy results. They are learning to live in tune with the infinite or cultivating optimism with complete success. To the objection that they live in an artificial paradise they reply that thought is the essence of things, and that they are but carrying into practice the oft-repeated belief that we are such stuff as dreams are made of.

“Religion,” says Professor William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egoism. The Gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing a personal call.” How could it be otherwise? The solitariness of each human soul is the first fact in religious consciousness. Altruism and communion with other souls are perforce attained through concern with the state of the ego. The spiritual egoism which demands pure thought, peace wherein to gather impressions of goodness, beauty, and truth, time for the analysis of psychic law, direct knowledge which is proof against the disease of doubt, is, after all, the most valuable contribution which the individual can make to society. The people who are now greatly concerned with the exact temperature of their own minds are, at any rate, to be congratulated on having made the discovery, which is centuries overdue, that hygiene of the soul is more important than hygiene of the body.

Placid contentment with the religious systems of the past is greatly disturbed by this assertiveness. There is a demand for a new message, couched in terms suited to the mental level of the twentieth century. A message delivered two thousand years ago to a small pastoral people, altogether innocent of the complicated economic, and industrial conditions of our times, must necessarily appear incomplete to minds which can only reproduce the simplicity by an effort of the imagination. Jesus, they maintain, was a Jew who spoke to Jews, and who had to deal with simple fishermen and agriculturists, with Eastern merchants and narrow-minded scribes. He never met great financiers to whose chariots of gold whole populations are chained, or great masters of industry who profitably run a thousand mills where human flesh and bone are ground in the production of wealth. He knew naught, they feel, of the history of philosophy, or the psychology of religion, or the researches of physiology and chemistry. His language, coming to us as it does through the medium of interpreters of a bygone age, and through the simple symbols of less sophisticated minds, has poetic beauty, but lacks our modern comprehensiveness.

There is a feeling that it is unreasonable to believe that God spoke once or twice, thousands of years ago, and that He cannot or will not speak now. Revelation cannot have been final; it must surely be progressive, gradual, fitted to the needs and the receptivity of souls. The written word is not the only word. The living word must be spoken now, and will be spoken with greater effectiveness in the future. Hence the expectation that a new world-teacher will appear, that a master will be born who will gather up the truth and the inspiration of the creeds of the past and present them, together with a new message, suited to the hunger of to-day. Theosophists have lately made the idea of the coming of such a teacher the central hope of social regeneration.

They assume that when the teacher comes all the world will listen and obey. It seems to me that teacher after teacher has uttered the truth—Hermes, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Orpheus, Jesus—and that the trouble is not lack of teachers but lack of disciples. In the teachings of Jesus Christ, the world has a model wherewith to mould the old order of hate and selfishness into a new rule of love and brotherhood. The model has never been used; no serious and far-reaching attempt has as yet been made to give Christianity a politico-social trial. Why should a new world-teacher be more successful? What guarantee is there that his voice would not be drowned in the general clamour of the truth-mongers of the marketplace? And the tendency of the modern religious consciousness is to seek reality personally, to develop the latent faculties by which experience can be won, and to delve fearlessly into the hidden depth of the soul in search of truth.

The great religions of the past have given the bread of life to countless souls. They have all provided ways and means for our ethical evolution. Religious eclecticism is natural to the cultured mind, which can no longer be held back by any threats of excommunication. The essence of religion, and the way of salvation, have been found along widely divergent paths and under many names. One thing is certain amidst innumerable uncertainties: the secret of finding God can only be unravelled when we find our own souls.