The condition of England

LITERATURE—at its highest estimate—is, however, only the luxury of the few. It influences a strictly limited class. It is produced by a still more limited class. It is so little operative upon the general life of the nation that its very claim to be considered in a survey of the “Condition of England” is doubtful. The published writings which in the least degree influence the life and opinion of the majority are the published writings not of the present but of the past. In so far as such existence occupies itself with anything beyond the newspapers or the sensational and generally excellent cheap fiction of the day, it is with the “World’s Classics,” or the reprints of established authors, which now are so plentifully provided in portable form by the various contemporary publishers. Whatever evidence of weariness or revolt may be exhibited by the tiny group of practising authors makes no impression upon the contented, boisterous spirit of Middle Class England; which is inclined to attribute all such criticism to a temper soured by disappointment or a disordered digestion. And below such classes lie the huge and inarticulate multitudes of the city people, who find what spiritual and emotional satisfactions “literature” can bring in the journals and popular writings which they consume with ever-increasing avidity. They seek romance—and find it—in a complex murder case, in stories of crime which seem to the fastidious sordid and disgusting, in stories dependent in their appeal upon sudden vicissitudes of fortune, in which chance or resolution are always breaking down the insupportable sequences of cause and effect. That a man shall reap as he has sown, that to-morrow shall be as yesterday, that inevitable law shall bind and control the revolt of human passion against circumstance—these are the affirmations of moralist and philosopher against which the popular spirit is in continual rebellion. Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free, and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city, life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion to a person or a cause.

To such the optimism and rejoicing of Jefferies or Morris is as much an enigma as the questionings and denials of Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. Bernard Shaw. They experience no exultation in Nature because they are cut off from the experience of Nature. They are untroubled by the question of the goal of the industrial process because their own particular part in it—the daily labour, the maintenance of the home, the occasional recreation of Saturday Sport or Sunday Excursion—absorbs all their available energies. “In June 1902,” says Mr. Ensor, “the writer piloted four crippled workmen from a working-class district in Manchester about some grounds on the edge of the suburbs, and put to them a practical flower catechism. Three of them, be it noted, had, before the events which left them cripples, enjoyed high wages and relative prosperity. None of them knew or could name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions, clover, pansies, or lilies of the valley, three of them were baffled by a poppy, the fourth felt confident that it was ‘a rose.’”[26] Of what avail, to such a company, to proclaim the exultation of the pageant of Summer, or the joy in old walled gardens under the apple trees “at the right time of the year.” And the crowd which grows delirious over the spectacle of the football contests, and frankly sets itself to enjoyment, in its own jolly fashion, in the Election scrimmage or on an August Bank Holiday, is not likely to find either inspiration or sadness in the problem of what is to be the fate of the human race when economic stability is finally secured.

Among all of these—and they comprise in all classes the overwhelming majority—the place of a Philosophy or a Literature must be taken by a Religion. And the question of the survival of a Religion—in the most liberal interpretation of the term—is the question of the survival of any extra-material ideal in the civilisation of the twentieth century. In this, the last of our researches into “the Condition of England,” generalisation is more than ever difficult. Religions which appear dead are so often discovered to be only sleeping, variations in faiths and devotions are so frequent between youth and age, a dark fortune and a bright, that it is quite impossible to accept any mere superficial demonstration of development or decay. Statistics of church-going, varying from generation to generation, such as those of a recent census in London, may indicate a fluctuation in faith, or an alteration in social custom. Impressions of individual observers, such as the researches of Mr. Charles Booth and his assistants into the religious life of the Capital, may at the best be the impressions gathered from various separated workers set in the midst of silent untestifying millions. In every age the sterner moralist has proclaimed a national apostasy, and witnessed with astonishment a world repudiating its ancient pieties. In every age the prophecy of immediate collapse has been falsified by the events of history. More than a hundred and fifty years ago the least sensational of all great Christian apologists declared that in England “it is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.” “And accordingly,” he continues in famous words, “they treat it as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point amongst all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule as it were, by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.” Yet the “pleasures of the world” find themselves still interrupted by a faith which, with its grave dug and its epitaph set up, unexpectedly refuses to expire. Any variation or section of it, whose end has been confidently predicted, will suddenly flare up again into violent life and upset all the calculations of its undertakers. In 1830 “the acutest characters of the time,” says Mr. Wilfred Ward, “considered that the Church of England was on its death-bed.” “It was folding its robes,” was Mozley’s verdict, “to die with what decency it could.” “The Church as it now stands,” wrote Arnold, “no human power could save.” But to-day on any impartial judgment the “Established Church” whatever gains or losses it may have received in the long struggle with indifference and unbelief, would never be threatened with any such suggestions of immediate destruction. Sidney Smith in 1827 could plead for toleration to Roman Catholics not because they were strong but because they were weak. The power of the Papacy was obviously a dead thing, in the future so conspicuously to become impotent, that he could exhort his fellow-countrymen to some charity towards a forlorn and piteous supplicant. “There is no Court of Rome,” he could assert, “and no Pope. There is a waxwork Pope and a waxwork Court of Rome. Popes of flesh and blood have long since disappeared. The follies of one century,” he proclaimed, “are scarcely credible to that which succeeds it; what will be said of all the intolerable trash which is issued forth at public meetings of ‘No Popery’? If the world lasts till 1927, this childish nonsense will have got out of the drawing-room and passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.” “If the world lasts till 1927,” there will probably be still orators of “No Popery,” and scornful critics of the same. But he would be a rash prophet to-day who would endorse Sidney Smith’s argument for toleration of a Pope and Court of Rome as being “waxworks,” when these “waxworks” have revealed themselves, in the interval, so amazingly alive.

Yet I think there can be no doubt that apart from any questions of future revival, present belief in religion, as a conception of life dependent upon supernatural sanctions or as a revelation of a purpose and meaning beyond the actual business of the day, is slowly but steadily fading from the modern city race. Tolerance, kindliness, sympathy, civilisation continually improve. Affirmation of any responsibility, beyond that to self and to humanity, continually declines. Life therefore gradually ceases to be influenced or coloured by any atmosphere of “other worldliness.” Present disabilities find no compensation in the hope of a future redress, which makes the present endurable. The general standard of humanitarian sentiment is probably higher in the cities than ever before, certainly exhibiting immense advance from that in the rude squalid barbarism of the submerged eighteenth-century life, or the vast penury and discontent of the early nineteenth. But a “background” was implied or assumed practically by the whole population, in these troublous days. Men lived as the beasts, and as the beasts perished. Yet few of them would have definitely denied that there existed a Creator and there awaited for them a judgment. The “Atheist” was as unpopular a figure as the Republican; and the sacking of the house of a “Unitarian” as congenial an occupation as a “No Popery” riot. To-day that “background” has vanished. The Churches are extraordinarily active, endeavouring in this way and in that to influence the lives of the people. Their humanitarian and social efforts are widely appreciated. Their definite dogmatic teachings seem to count for little at all. They labour on steadily amid a huge indifference. The very material of their appeal is vanishing. Fear which is the beginning of wisdom no longer terrifies a society which sees orderly arrangements everywhere accepting the secure as the normal. It cannot believe that, even if any future world exists at all—of which existence it is becoming increasingly doubtful—that future world will not in essence re-establish the decencies and commonplaces of the modern city state. There is less material therefore to-day for the appeal—to the general—of the revivalist preacher, with which Wesley and Whitefield changed the face of eighteenth-century England. The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring close to the Celestial City, represent an apparatus of experience that is alien to the present. “Religion,” was Dolling’s testimony from Poplar, “has, so to speak, gone to pieces. There is no opposition. We do not care enough to oppose. God is not in any of our thoughts: we do not even fear Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. Heaven has no attraction, because we should be out of place there. And Hell has no terrors.”

And although this fading of the background is perhaps less manifest in country than in town, and less in the industrial provinces than in the capital, its effect can be apprehended amongst all classes of the community and throughout the whole of the modern world. The meaning is gone from phrases which are still repeated, whose significance is becoming historical merely. The tide is ebbing within and without the Churches. The drift is towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindliness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on the service of men than the fulfilment of the will of God. Most modern activities of the great religious bodies are coming more and more to enlarge themselves into efforts towards social or humanitarian reforms. Even the noisy warfare between the various denominations may be interpreted less as a sign of secure vitality than as evidence of uncertain position; a struggle excited less by confidence than by foreboding. Whirlpools of brave and often feverish energy are maintained amid the prevailing indifference. The children are everywhere persuaded to attend the centres of religious teaching; everywhere, as they struggle to manhood and womanhood in a world of such doubtful certainties, they exhibit a large falling away. The sternness and severity and compelling claims of the ancient injunctions to repentance and an ordered life become replaced by a general sense of vague and misty optimism, in which the former beliefs are less definitely denied than put aside as negligible and irrelevant to the business of the day. “The great bulk,” is one general verdict of Mr. Booth’s investigation, “seem to be incapable of attaining to that pressing sense of sin which is the common basis not only of these but of most other forms of Christian teaching.” “Those who have any definite convictions,” testifies a hospital chaplain, “are few and far between: they have for the most part put religion deliberately out of their lives, and dislike to be reminded of it.” Another observer finds “a very great variety of aim, but an almost universal sense of disappointment.” “All have empty churches,” is the sweeping verdict over one large industrial borough, “and the general attitude of the people is that of complete indifference.” “Those of the poor who attend religious services,” is another general verdict, “are mostly bought.” “They take their religion lightly,” is perhaps the final word upon twentieth-century England, “and are much inclined to believe that it will all come right in the end.”[27]

These changes amongst the wealthy and prosperous are perhaps negligible; because—with of course many exceptions—in no society have “they that have riches” ever entered but hardly into the kingdom of any God. But among the Middle Classes—the centre and historical support of England’s Protestant creed—the drift away is acknowledged by all to be conspicuous—by friend as well as by enemy. The country is here following the town; and amongst the industrial people the prophecy of Taine thirty years ago would appear to be fulfilling itself to-day: “By an insensible and slow backward movement, the great rural mass, like the great urban mass, is gradually going back to Paganism.”

It is a European movement, conspicuous even to the superficial observer. At intervals there are efforts at diagnosis, even random efforts at cure. Missions and revivals produce transitory tides invigorating the older faiths—like the Catholic reaction in France after the disasters of 1870, or the rise of the Salvation Army a little later in the great towns of England. Despite such rallies, however, the process continues. It continues without violence, continuously, steadily, as a kind of impersonal motion of secular change. It is the passing of a whole civilisation away from the faith in which it was founded and out of which it has been fashioned. Mr. Hueffer, in his Spirit of the People, tells the story of a neighbour who after a late evening service in the village church suddenly discovered that he no longer believed in the immortality of the soul. And that is typical of the change in the world of to-day. It is not becoming atheist. It is ceasing to believe, without being conscious of the process, until it suddenly wakes up to the fact that the process is complete.

Most attempted explanations fall into the quite natural error of ascribing the indifference towards the enterprise of the Churches of the English city populations to those particular elements of their teaching or action which they regard as pernicious. In examination of these mysterious multitudes which have collected in the new towns it is always possible to find anything that one desires—drunkenness and temperance, happiness and misery, aspiration and indifference, cowardice and courage. This is specially true when the observer seeks to penetrate beneath the surface and to examine the actual spiritual beliefs and apprehensions accepted by large masses of men whose thoughts on such subjects are never clearly expressed. A few years ago a number of the religious leaders of this country collected in a symposium their explanation of this change.[28] And the replies are very characteristic in their reference of causes to things which are disliked or denied. Dr. Horton, from his study at Hampstead, opines that drink is the chief cause of the indifference to Christianity of the working classes. He would add also absence of good preaching. He judges from the crowds which come to hear the good preacher, that preachers of similar power would draw similar crowds beneath every pulpit. But it is just as possible, and perhaps more demonstrable by experience, that the good preacher only attracts the preacher-loving class from the bad preachers, without substantially recruiting the class from the indifferent outside. The water is decanted from bottle to bottle without increasing its bulk. And drink certainly does not separate from religion the Scotch or Irish in their own land, or the Irish in the great cities of England and America. Nor is there any particular reason why drunkenness should exercise a more general estrangement than the other, more respectable of the deadly sins. Mr. Silas Hocking, again, dislikes war and sacerdotalism. He therefore announces that the Church’s alliance with war and sacerdotalism are the cause of the modern falling away from religion. But the Church and war have lived in some condition of mutual tolerance for nineteen centuries. And as in his vision Christianity practically ceased to exist, “since in the early centuries it became corrupted by paganism,” we may assume that here also some friendly agreement had been possible beforetime, which might not be impossible to-day.

Many social reformers very frequently ascribe the abandonment of the churches by the working classes to the fact that the Church has been the Church of a class, filled with respectabilities and caste distinctions, and hostile to the newer movements for the collective welfare of labour. Such reformers, that is to say, eagerly desire that the Church should abandon the stiff and formal ways of its class traditions, should become more friendly and universal in its appeal, and should concern itself actively and intelligently with the problems of poverty and social discontent. But it would seem impossible to assume that such a transformation of organised Christianity would bring back the people to the spiritual affirmation of their fathers. Letters frequently appear in the newspapers, alike pathetic and passionate, from those who have been sweated by “Christian” employers, or have been offended by hearing clergymen openly supporting “wars of aggression” or opposing the franchise and free libraries. But there is no evidence—because in the nature of things such evidence cannot be forthcoming—to prove that the correspondents or the crowd represented by them would be accepting the enormous affirmations of Theism or of Christianity if all these things were suddenly changed.

Again, many good men have perhaps too fatuously discovered and proclaimed that there is “no hostility to Christ” amongst the working men. One observer in the symposium above quoted can find satisfaction in the fact that a crowd of men flung up their caps and cheered His name on Tower Hill. “Such straws show which way the wind blows.” Such “straws” show nothing more than any noise and excitement have shown since the day of the riding into Jerusalem, or the scene in the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Why should any one to-day be “hostile to Christ”? And what relationship has such vague toleration or applause to anything in the nature of a vital and compelling faith? All such sentiment belongs to the same class as that of the comfortable householder, leading a life of respectable and benignant self-indulgence, who will inform you in a burst of confidence that his religion is that of the “Sermon on the Mount,” or one “of willingness to do good.” There is no more common illusion than the interpretation of ethical judgment as spiritual affirmation. To all such advocates of an inexacting standard Christianity appears as a rule of common life, which has been somehow evaded or destroyed. But Christianity is something widely different from a rule of common life. It is a creed, not a system of morals. Religion is an attempt at some ultimate assertion concerning the being and purpose of the world. No tolerance of the virtues specifically Christian or admiration of a life lost in the distant centuries can guarantee that creed’s validity, or restore a faith which appears to be slipping over the visible horizon of mankind.

There is morality without faith; kindliness and devotion with no “consciousness of a divine inheritance or of the sin by which it is lost.” Such is the testimony of Canon Barrett, from thirty years’ experience of every class in English society. The people of East London especially are better mannered, better dressed, more respectable, more sober than the people of a previous generation. But they have “less idealism,” “less superstition.” “Joy” is in consequence lacking. Life is more respectable, less vivid. The salt of life is somehow losing its savour. Whatever scale of value is represented by the outlook upon larger spiritual kingdoms is vanishing. And the scale is in consequence contracting, truncated. “The desertion of the churches and the somewhat undignified efforts of the churches to attract congregations are equally the outward signs of spiritual failing.”

Here is the kernel of the whole matter. Ethical advance is accompanied (as it seems) by spiritual decline. It was the process which so perplexed Mr. Gladstone more than half a century ago. Growth of morality is coincident with decline in religion. Violent controversialists still endeavour to demonstrate the opposite, exhibiting murders, thefts, and adulteries accompanying the introduction of secular education or the disestablishment of a Church. On a large survey the facts do not bear such an interpretation. The work of civilisation steadily advances. The vision of a universe beyond or behind the material steadily fades.

My effort here is confined to diagnosis, not prophecy. And prophecy concerning religion is of all forecasts the most impossible. For never is it safe to assume that any piece of solid ground may not suddenly flare and tremble, or any common bush commence to burn with fire. Remembering the historic failures in similar ages of rationalism, the contemptuous dismissal by Tacitus, in a kind of footnote, of the faith which was to transform the world, he would be rash who asserted that even to-day and in this secure civilisation there may not be the seed growing which will survive when this very society shall have vanished from the earth. My own belief is that the so-called intellectual difficulties of belief are to-day less operative amongst the masses of mankind than certain other changes which are powerful in modern life. I should put in the forefront of these the creation of the towns, with their machinery and their confusion; the condition of labour within their boundaries; and the establishment of security and order in the present “Roman Peace” which has come upon the western races of Europe. The result, as Dolling saw it amongst his people in East London, is a life universally dull, decorous, decent. Nor can we estimate what developments may originate from such a condition of uniform comfort and acquiescence. General Booth in his Salvation Army, the most remarkable spiritual product of the present age, has shown how the inspiration may come in a sudden flaming up of the incalculable elements of the soul of man, amongst seemingly drab and unimportant people; with a craving for self-immolation, and the intrusion into commonplace accepted ways of the vision of blood and fire. The fruit and duration of such a state are equally difficult to foresee. Sidgwick concluded at the end of his days that “humanity would never acquiesce in a godless world.” “If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,” was Carlyle’s fierce comment, “all or most of them, there will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for several centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.” The first experiment on a large scale of society organised on a positive basis came to a premature end: through the intrusion of Christianity and the advent of the barbarian. The second seems about to be established. It should prove an interesting study to any observer possessing the felicity of seeing alike its commencement and its close. But it is not impossible that the same two disturbing elements—the advent of the barbarian, intrusion of Christianity—may once again prevent the realisation, upon adequate scale and through any substantial period, of life seeking comfort in a rational society.