Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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The mechanical theory of devolution which assumes so much importance in
some fashionable Anglican teaching about the Church need not detain us
long. The logical choice must ultimately be between the great
international Catholic Church and what Auguste Sabatier called the
religion of the Spirit. The religion of all Protestants, when it is not
secularised, as it too often is, belongs to this latter type, even when
they lay most stress on the idea of brotherhood and corporate action.
For with them institutions are never much more than associations for
mutual help and edification. The Protestant always hopes to be saved
_qua_ Christian, not _qua_ Churchman.

A third question which must be asked is whether institutionalism in
practice makes for unity among Christians, or for division. Too often
the chief visible sign of the 'corporate idea' of which so much is said,
is the rigidity of the spikes which it erects round its own particular
fold. The obstacles to acts of reunion (which in no way carry with them
the necessity of formal amalgamation) are raised almost exclusively by
stiff institutionalists. The much-discussed Kikuyu case has brought this
home to everybody. But for these uncompromising Churchmen, Christians of
all denominations would be glad enough to meet together at the Lord's
table on special occasions like the service which gave rise to this
controversy. Anglicans are well aware that the differences of opinion
within their body are far greater than those which separate some of them
from Protestant Nonconformity, and others of them from Home. Allegiance
to this or that denomination is generally an accident of early
surroundings. To make these external classifications into barriers which
cannot be crossed is either an absurdity or a confession that a Church
is a political aggregate. A Roman Monsignor explained, _a propos_ of the
Kikuyu service, that no Roman Catholic could ever communicate in a
Protestant church, because in so doing he would be guilty of an act of
apostasy, and would be no longer a Roman Catholic. The attitude is
consistent with the Roman claim to universal jurisdiction; for any other
body it would be absurd. The stiff institutionalist is debarred by his
theory from fraternising with many who should be his friends, while he
is bound to others with whom he has no sympathy. His theory is once more
found to conflict with the facts.

Lastly, we must ask whether institutionalism is really a spiritual and
moral force. Of the advantages of _esprit de corps_ I have spoken
already. No one can doubt that unity is strength, or that Catholicism
has an immense advantage over its rivals in the efficiency of its
organisation. But is not this advantage dearly purchased? Party loyalty
is notoriously unscrupulous. The idealised institution becomes itself
the object of worship, and it is entirely forgotten that a Christian
Church ought to have no 'interests' except the highest welfare of
humanity. The substitution of military for civil ethics has worked
disastrously on the conduct of Churchmen. Theoretically it is admitted
by Roman casuists that an immoral order ought not to be obeyed; but it
is not for a layman to pronounce immoral any order received from a
priest; if the order is really immoral, 'obedience' exonerates him who
executes it; in all other cases disobedience is a deadly sin. The result
of this submission of private judgment is that the voice of conscience
is often stifled, and unscrupulous policies are carried through by
Churchmen, which secular public opinion would have condemned decisively
and rejected. The persecution of Dreyfus is a recent and strong
instance. If all France had been Catholic, the victim of this shocking
injustice would certainly have died in prison. It is extremely doubtful
whether the presence of a highly organised Church is conducive to moral
and social reform in a country. The temptation to play a political game
seems to be always too strong. In Ireland the priesthood has probably
helped to maintain a comparatively high standard of sexual morality, but
it cannot be said that the Irish Catholic population is in other
respects a model of civilisation and good citizenship. In education
especially the influence of ecclesiasticism has been almost uniformly
pernicious, so that it seems impossible for any country where the
children are left under priestly influence to rise above a certain
rather low level of civilisation. The strongest claim of
institutionalism to our respect is probably the beneficial restraint
which it exercises upon many persons who need moral and intellectual
guidance. It is the fashion to disparage the scholastic theology, and it
has certainly suffered by being congealed, like everything else that
Rome touches, into a hard system; but it is immeasurably superior to the
theosophies and fancy religions which run riot in the superficially
cultivated classes of Protestant countries. The undisciplined mystic, in
his reliance on the inner light, may fall into various kinds of
_Schwaermerei_ and superstition. In some cases he may even lose his
sanity for want of a wise restraining influence. It is not an accident
that America, where institutionalism is weakest, is the happy
hunting-ground of religious quacks and cranks. Individualists are too
prone to undervalue the steadying influence of ancient and consecrated
tradition, which is kept up mainly by ecclesiastical institutions. These
probably prevent many rash experiments from being tried, especially in
the field of morals. Even writers like Dr. Frazer insist on the immense
services which consecrated tradition still renders to humanity. These
claims may be admitted; but they come very far short of the
glorification of institutionalism which we found in the authors quoted a
few pages back.

The institutionalist, however, may reply that he by no means admits the
validity of Sabatier's antithesis between religions of authority and the
religion of the Spirit. His own religion, he believes, is quite as
spiritual as that of the Protestant individualist. He may quote the fine
saying of a medieval mystic that he who can see the inward in the
outward is more spiritual than he who can only see the inward in the
inward. We may, indeed, be thankful that we have not to choose between
two mutually exclusive types of religion. The Quaker, whom we may take
as the type of anti-institutional mysticism, has a brotherhood to which
he is proud to belong, and for which he feels loyalty and affection. And
Catholicism has been rich in contemplative saints who have lived in the
light of the Divine presence. The question raised in this essay is
rather of the relative importance of these two elements in the religious
life, than of choosing one and rejecting the other. I will conclude by
saying that our preference of one of these types to the other will be
largely determined by our attitude towards history. I am glad to see
that Professor Bosanquet, in his fine Gifford Lectures, has the courage
to expose the limitations of the 'historical method,' now so popular. He
protests against Professor Ward's dictum that 'the actual is wholly
historical,' as a view little better than naive realism. History, he
says, is a hybrid form of experience, incapable of any considerable
degree of being or trueness. It is a fragmentary diorama of finite
life-processes seen from the outside, and very imperfectly known. It
consists largely of assigning parts in some great world-experience to
particular actors--a highly speculative enterprise. To set these
contingent and dubious constructions above the operations of pure
thought and pure insight is indeed a return to the philosophy of the man
in the street. 'Social morality, art, philosophy, and religion take us
far beyond the spatio-temporal externality of history; these are
concrete and necessary living worlds, and in them the finite mind begins
to experience something of what individuality must ultimately mean.' Our
inquiry has thus led us to the threshold of one of the fundamental
problems of philosophy--the value and reality of time. For the
institutionalist, happenings in time have a meaning and importance far
greater than the mystic is willing to allow to them. Like most other
great philosophical problems, this question is largely one of
temperament. Christianity has found room for both types. I believe,
however, that the aberrations or exaggerations of institutionalism have
been, and are, more dangerous, and further removed from the spirit of
Christianity than those of mysticism, and that we must look to the
latter type, rather than to the former, to give life to the next
religious revival.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] Moore, _Science and the Faith_, Introduction.

[91] Troeltsch, _Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu
fuer den Glauben,_ pp. 25 _sq_.

[92] Royce, _The Problem of Christianity_, vol. i. 39.

THE INDICTMENT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY

(1917)

No thinking man can deny that this war has grievously stained the
reputation of Europe. Even if the verdict of history confirms the
opinion that the conspiracy which threw the torch into the
powder-magazine was laid by a few persons in one or two countries, and
that the unparalleled outrages which have accompanied the conflict were
ordered by a small coterie of brutal officers, we cannot forget that
these crimes have been committed by the responsible representatives of a
civilised European power, and that the nation which they represent has
shown no qualms of conscience. That such a calamity, the permanent
results of which include a holocaust of European wealth and credit,
accumulated during a century of unprecedented industry and ingenuity,
the loss of innumerable lives, and the destruction of all the old and
honourable conventions which have hitherto regulated the intercourse of
civilised nations with each other, in war as well as in peace, should
have been possible, is justly felt to be a reproach to the whole
continent, and especially to the nations which have taken the lead in
its civilisation and culture. The ancient races of Asia, which have
never admitted the moral superiority of the West, are keenly interested
spectators of our suicidal frenzy. A Japanese is reported to have said,
'We have only to wait a little longer, till Europe has completed her
_hara kiri_.' This is, indeed, what any intelligent observer must think
about the present struggle. Just as the feudal barons of England
destroyed each other and brought the feudal system to an end in the
Wars of the Roses, so the great industrial nations are rending to pieces
the whole fabric of modern industrialism, which can never be
reconstructed. Mr. Norman Angell was perfectly right in his argument
that a European war would be ruinous to both sides. The material objects
at stake, such as the control of the Turkish Empire and the African
continent, are not worth more than an insignificant fraction of the
war-bill. We are witnessing the suicide of a social order, and our
descendants will marvel at our madness, as we marvel at the senseless
wars of the past.

There has, it is plain, been something fundamentally wrong with European
civilisation, and the disease appears to be a moral one. With this
conviction it is natural that men should turn upon the official
custodians of religion and morality, and ask them whether they have been
unfaithful to their trust, or whether it is not rather proved that the
faith which they profess is itself bankrupt and incapable of exerting
any salutary influence upon human character and action. Christianity
stands arraigned at the bar of public opinion. But it is not without
significance that the indictment should now be urged with a vehemence
which we do not find in the records of former convulsions. It was not
generally felt to be a scandal to Christianity that England was at war
for 69 years out of the 120 which preceded the battle of Waterloo.
Either our generation expected more from Christianity, or it was far
more shocked by the sudden outbreak of this fierce war than our
ancestors were by the almost chronic condition of desultory campaigning
to which they were accustomed. The latter is probably the true reason.
The belief in progress, which at the beginning of the industrial
revolution was an article of faith, had become a tacitly accepted
presupposition of all serious thought; and even those who were dubious
about the moral improvement of mankind in other directions, seldom
denied that we were more humane and peaceable than our forefathers. The
disillusion has struck our self-complacency in its most vital spot.
Nothing in our own experience had prepared us for the hideous savagery
and vandalism of German warfare, the first accounts of which we
received with blank amazement and incredulity. Then, when disbelief was
no longer possible, there awoke within us a sense of fear for our homes
and women and children--feeling to which modern civilised man had long
been a stranger. We had not supposed that the non-combatant population
of any European country would ever again be exposed to the horrors of
savage warfare. This, much more than the war itself, has made thousands
feel that the house of civilisation is built upon the sand, and that
Christianity has failed to subdue the most barbarous instincts of human
nature. Christians cannot regret that the flagrant contradiction between
the principles of their creed and the scenes that have been enacted
during the last three years is fully recognised. But the often repeated
statement that 'Christianity has failed' needs more examination than it
usually receives from those who utter it.

History acquaints us with two kinds of religion, which, though they are
not entirely separate from each other, differ very widely in their
effects upon conduct and morality. The _religio_ which Lucretius hated,
and from which he strangely hoped that the atomistic materialism of
Epicurus had finally delivered mankind, has its roots in the sombre and
confused superstitions of the savage. Fear, as Statius and Petronius
tell us, created the gods of this religion. These deities are mysterious
and capricious powers, who exact vengeance for the transgression of
arbitrary laws which they have not revealed, and who must be propitiated
by public sacrifice, lest some collective punishment fall on the tribe,
blighting its crops and smiting its herds with murrain, or giving it
over into the hand of its enemies. This religion makes very little
attempt to correct the current standard of values. Its rewards are
wealth and prosperity; its punishments are calamity in this world and
perhaps torture in the next. It is not, however, incapable of
moralisation. The wrath of heaven may visit not the innocent violation
of some _tabu_, but cruelty and injustice. In the historical books of
the Old Testament, though Uzzah is stricken dead for touching the ark,
and the subjects of King David afflicted with pestilence because their
ruler took a census of his people, Jehovah is above all things a
righteous God, who punishes bloodshed, adultery, and social oppression.
So in Greece the Furies pursue the homicide and the perjurer, till the
name of his family is clean put out. Herodotus tells us how the family
of Glaucus was extinguished because he consulted the oracle of Delphi
about an act of embezzlement which he was meditating.

International law was protected by the same fear of divine vengeance.
The murder of heralds must by all means be expiated. When the Romans
repudiate their 'scrap of paper' with the Samnites, they deliver up to
the enemy the officers who signed it, though (with characteristic
'slimness') not the army which the mountaineers had captured and
liberated under the agreement. To destroy the temples in an enemy's
country was an act of wanton impiety; Herodotus cannot understand the
religious intolerance which led the Persians to burn the shrines of
Greek gods. Thus religion had a restraining influence in war throughout
antiquity, and in the Middle Ages. The Pope, who was believed to hold
the keys of future bliss and torment, was frequently, though by no means
always, obeyed by the turbulent feudal lords, and often enforced the
sanctity of a contract by the threat or the imposition of
excommunication and interdict. In order to make these penalties more
terrible, the torments of those who died under the displeasure of the
Church were painted in the most vivid colours. But in the official and
popular Christian eschatology, as in the terrestrial theodicy of the Old
Testament, there is little or no moral idealism. The joys or pains of
the future life are made to depend, in part at least, on the observance
or violation of the moral law, but they are themselves of a kind which
the natural man would desire or dread. They are an enhanced, because a
deferred, retribution of the same kind which in more primitive religions
promises earthly prosperity to the righteous, and earthly calamities to
the wicked. Values, positive and negative, are taken nearly as they
stand in the estimation of the average man.

But there is another religious tradition, which in Greece was almost
separated from the official and national cults, and among the Hebrews
was often in opposition to them. The Hebrew prophets certainly
proclaimed that 'the history of the world is the judgment of the world,'
and often assumed, too crudely as it seems to us, that national
calamities are a proof of national transgression; but the whole course
of development in prophecy was towards an autonomous morality based on a
spiritual valuation of life. Its quarrel with sacerdotalism was mainly
directed against the unethical _tabu_-morality of the priesthood; the
revolt was grounded in a lofty moral idealism, which found expression in
a half-symbolic vision of a coming state in which might and right should
coincide. The apocalyptic prophecies of post-exilic Judaism, which were
not based, like some political predictions of the earlier prophets, on a
statesmanlike view of the international situation, but on hopes of
supernatural intervention, had their roots in visions of a new and
better world-order. This aspiration, which had to disentangle itself by
degrees from the patriotic dreams of a stubborn and unfortunate race,
was projected into the near future, and was mixed with less worthy
political ambitions which had a different origin. The prophet always
foreshortens his revelation, and generally blends the city of God with a
vision of his own country transfigured. We see him doing this even
to-day, in his Utopian dreams of social reconstruction.

And so it has always been. We remember Condorcet foretelling a reign of
truth and peace just before he was compelled to flee from the storm of
calumny to die in a damp cell at Bourg la Reine; and Kant hailing the
approach of a peaceful international republic while Napoleon was
preparing to drown Europe in blood. Apocalyptism is a compromise between
the religion of rewards and punishments and the religion of spiritual
deliverance. It calls a new world into existence to redress the balance
of the old; but its discontent with the old is mainly the result of a
moral and spiritual valuation of life. Greek philosophy has really much
in common with Hebrew prophecy, though the Greek envisaged his ideal
world as the eternal background of reality, and not under the form of
history. In its maturest form, it is a transvaluation of all values in
accordance with an absolute ideal standard--that of the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful. This idealism appears in a still more drastic form in
the religions of Asia, which preach deliverance by demonetising at a
stroke all the world's currency. Spiritual values are alone accepted;
man wins peace and freedom by renouncing in advance all of which fortune
may deprive him.

We are apt to assume, in deference to our theories of human progress,
that the evolution of religion is normally from a lower to a higher
type. It would, indeed, be absurd to question that the religion of a
civilised people is usually more spiritual and more rational than that
of barbarians. But none the less, the history of religions is generally
a history of decline. In Judaism the prophets came before the Scribes
and the Pharisees. Brahmanism and Buddhism were both degraded by
superstitions and unethical rites. Christianity, which began as a
republication of the purest prophetic teaching, has suffered the same
fate. In each case, when the revelation has lost its freshness, and the
enthusiasm which it evoked has begun to cool, a reversion to older
habits of thought and customs takes place; and sometimes it may be said
that the old religion has really conquered the new.

Christianity, as taught by its Founder, is based on a transvaluation of
values even more complete than that of Stoicism and the later Platonism,
because, while it regards the objects of ordinary ambition as a positive
hindrance to the higher life, it accepts and gives value to those pains
of sympathy which Greek thought dreaded, as detracting from the calm
enjoyment of the philosophic life. This acceptance of the world's
suffering, from which every other spiritual religion and philosophy
promise a way of escape, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of
Christian ethics. In practice, it thus achieves a more complete conquest
of evil than any other system; and by bringing sorrow and sympathy into
the Divine life, it not only presents the character and nature of the
Deity in a new light, but opens out a new ideal of moral perfection.
This is not the place for a discussion of the main characteristics of
the Gospel of Christ, and they are familiar to us all. But, since we are
now considering the charge of failure brought against Christianity in
connexion with the present world-war, it seems necessary to emphasise
two points which are not always remembered.

The first is that there is no evidence that the historical Christ ever
intended to found a new institutional religion. He neither attempted to
make a schism in the Jewish Church nor to substitute a new system for
it. He placed Himself deliberately in the prophetic line, only claiming
to sum up the series in Himself. The whole manner of His life and
teaching was prophetic. The differences which undoubtedly may be found
between His style and that of the older prophets do not remove Him from
the company in which He clearly wished to stand. He treated the
institutional religion of His people with the independence and
indifference of the prophet and mystic; and the hierarchy, which, like
other hierarchies, had a sure instinct in discerning a dangerous enemy,
was not slow to declare war to the knife against Him. Such, He reminded
His enemies, was the treatment which all the prophets had met with from
the class to which those enemies belonged. This, then, is the first fact
to remember. Institutional Christianity may be a legitimate and
necessary historical development from the original Gospel, but it is
something alien to the Gospel itself. The first disciples believed that
they had the Master's authority for expecting the end of the existing
world-order in their own lifetime. They believed that He had come
forward with the cry of 'Hora novissima!' Whether they misunderstood Him
or not, they clearly could not have held this opinion if they had
received instructions for the constitution of a Church.

The second point on which it is necessary to insist is that Christ never
expected, or taught His disciples to expect, that His teaching would
meet with wide acceptance, or exercise political influence. 'The
world'--organised human society--was the enemy and was to continue the
enemy. His message, He foresaw, would be scorned and rejected by the
majority; and those who preached it were to expect persecution. This
warning is repeated so often in the Gospels that it would be superfluous
to give quotations. He made it quite plain that the big battalions are
never likely to be gathered before the narrow gate. He declared that
only false prophets are well spoken of by the majority. When we consider
the revolutionary character of the Christian idealism, its indifference
to nearly all that passes for 'religion' with the vulgar, and its
reversal of all current valuations, it is plain that it is never likely
to be a popular creed. As surely as the presence of high spiritual
instincts in the human mind guarantees its indestructibility, so surely
the deeply-rooted prejudices which keep the majority on a lower level
must prevent the Gospel of Christ from dominating mundane politics or
social life.

Moreover, the actual extent of its influence cannot be estimated. The
inwardness and individualism of its teaching make its apparent
effectiveness smaller than its real power, which works secretly and
unobserved. The vices which Christ regarded with abhorrence are
perversions of character--hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, and worldliness
or secularity; and who can say what degree of success the Gospel has
achieved in combating these? The method of Christianity is alien to all
externalism and machinery; it does not lend itself to those
accommodations and compromises without which nothing can be done in
politics. As Harnack says, the Gospel is not one of social improvement,
but of spiritual redemption. Its influence upon social and political
life is indirect and obscure, operating through a subtle modification of
current valuations, and curbing the competitive and acquisitive
instincts, which nearly correspond with what Christ called 'Mammon' and
St. Paul 'the flesh.' Christianity is a spiritual dynamic, which has
very little to do directly with the mechanism of social life.

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