IX - AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER
The last chapter has been concerned with the
contention that orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe
guardian of morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of
liberty, innovation and advance. If we wish to pull down the prosperous
oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can
do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent
cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific
theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory
that mind precedes matter. If we wish specially to awaken people to social
vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting
on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best reasons for
contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and the
flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent. If we wish
particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a
dreadful autocracy we shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian.
If we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist
rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal.
And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to
think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero.
Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules
and clear dogmas. The RULES of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor
member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.
And now we come to the crucial question which
truly concludes the whole matter. A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to
agree with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found a
practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well. You have found a
side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely asserted in Original Sin;
all right. You have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you.
You are convinced that worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are
progressive; I congratulate them. But even supposing that those doctrines do
include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines?
Granted that all modern society is trusting the rich too much because it does
not allow for human weakness; granted that orthodox ages have had a great
advantage because (believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness,
why cannot you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall?
If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents a healthy idea of
danger, why can you not simply take the idea of danger and leave the idea of
damnation? If you see clearly the kernel of common-sense in the nut of
Christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?
Why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which I, as a highly
scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using) why cannot you simply take
what is good in Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can
comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their
nature incomprehensible?" This is the real question; this is the last
question; and it is a pleasure to try to answer it.
The first answer is simply to say that I am a
rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.
If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual convenience to me
to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd psychological reason, that I
can deal better with a man's exercise of freewill if I believe that he has got
it. But I am in this matter yet more definitely a rationalist. I do not propose
to turn this book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad
to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more obvious
arena. Here I am only giving an account of my own growth in spiritual
certainty. But I may pause to remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract
arguments against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean
that having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I
then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation
and found them to be common nonsense. In case the argument should be thought to
suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic I will here very briefly
summarise my own arguments and conclusions on the purely objective or
scientific truth of the matter.
If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question,
why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason
that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it
quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of
the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration;
it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist
is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous
and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the
mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four
books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The
very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of
the fact that they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of
the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of
these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for
Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it.
For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that
none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts
flows the other way. Let us take cases. Many a sensible modern man must have
abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions
as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are,
after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second,
that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have
blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian
arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate;
and they all converge. The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are
all untrue. If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you
begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination,
any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling
thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the
monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and
brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should
then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has
hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having
hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the
violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture
and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a
roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the
material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants
and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization;
but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who
ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has
seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm
between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a
chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that
has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged
respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals;
man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this
first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its
opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.
It would be the same if I examined the second of
the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call
divine began in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the
foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none. Science
knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he
is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as
human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually
dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of
indirect evidence is very much the other way. In the earliest legends we have,
such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced
as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful
exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all
say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of
progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly
enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its
authenticity. Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot
be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with
these paradoxes.
And if we took the third chance instance, it would
be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the
world and simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe which are
still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still
singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic
doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity
is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy
some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So
long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves
into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the
walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not
fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in
terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.
Thus these three facts of experience, such facts
as go to make an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round. I am left
saying, "Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of
man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient
happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the
countries of the Catholic Church." One explanation, at any rate, covers
all three: the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by some
explosion or revelation such as people now call "psychic." Once
Heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God,
whereby man took command of Nature; and once again (when in empire after empire
men had been found wanting) Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a
man. This would explain why the mass of men always look backwards; and why the
only corner where they in any sense look forwards is the little continent where
Christ has His Church. I know it will be said that Japan has become
progressive. But how can this be an answer when even in saying "Japan has
become progressive," we really only mean, "Japan has become
European"? But I wish here not so much to insist on my own explanation as
to insist on my original remark. I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in
the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to
something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed to
something else.
I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary
anti-Christian arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur
of the moment another. These are the kind of thoughts which in combination
create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased. First,
for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere
ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished
in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back;
third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will)
superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the
times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked
into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical,
but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead of looking at books and
pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found
an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or
his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder
and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing
with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful
demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god— and always like a god.
Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think,
elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the A FORTIORI. His
"how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in
the clouds. The diction used ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet
and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque;
it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea.
Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and
told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other
even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery;
but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain
it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent
channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the
difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a
superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other.
The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is
the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling
synthesis.
I take in order the next instance offered: the
idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself
with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I
found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one
path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting
two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance
and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean
civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming
with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed
the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but
it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and
glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the
religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the
load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we
arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading
empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization
ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under
some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old
society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were
forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch.
In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing
we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us
back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out
of them.
I added in this second trinity of objections an
idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened
or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar
case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It
is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain
for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is DONE
about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite
painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their
members are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no
other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The
Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole
British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only
poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. These
people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden.
And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same.
Irishmen are best at the specially HARD professions—the trades of iron, the
lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same
conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not
looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or
even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very
antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the
namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval
darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I
wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What
is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a
living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet
force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame
a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they
ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire
can actually help itself?"
There is an answer: it is an answer to say that
the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one
of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and
respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or
the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only
modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often
at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or
costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are
always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an
exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural
life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an
awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our
civilization OUGHT to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological
probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration
of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all
REVENANTS; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe
was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered
into its body. And Europe has had a strange life—it is not too much to say that
it has had the JUMPS— ever since.
I have dealt at length with such typical triads of
doubt in order to convey the main contention—that my own case for Christianity
is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like
the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his
facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are
untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they
weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do
not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very
industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful;
because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly
bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from
the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the
rapidity of a railway train.
But among these million facts all flowing one way
there is, of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated
briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. In
another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition that
the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is just as likely
to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my own positive
conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I
admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call it a faith or an intuition,
for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly an intellectual
conviction; but it is a PRIMARY intellectual conviction like the certainty of
self of the good of living. Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in
God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that
miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I
believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon
this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and
cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the
disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in
miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the
other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because
they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or
wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious,
democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a
miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a
murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the
ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being
a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.
Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant,
and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a
choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you
reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story
about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a
ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you
affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of
miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the
dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you
rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your
creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking
impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to
the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is
always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain
miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But
mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were
superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.
If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are
so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer
is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have
seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen
Iceland. It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the
unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally
forgets to use it.
He may say that there has been in many miraculous
stories a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance: in short, that the
miracle could only come to him who believed in it. It may be so, and if it is
so how are we to test it? If we are inquiring whether certain results follow
faith, it is useless to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow
faith. If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a most
healthy right to laugh. But they have no right to judge. Being a believer may
be, if you like, as bad as being drunk; still if we were extracting
psychological facts from drunkards, it would be absurd to be always taunting
them with having been drunk. Suppose we were investigating whether angry men
really saw a red mist before their eyes. Suppose sixty excellent householders
swore that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud: surely it would be
absurd to answer "Oh, but you admit you were angry at the time." They
might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus), "How the blazes could we
discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?" So the
saints and ascetics might rationally reply, "Suppose that the question is
whether believers can see visions—even then, if you are interested in visions
it is no point to object to believers." You are still arguing in a
circle—in that old mad circle with which this book began.
The question of whether miracles ever occur is a
question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any
final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless
piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific
conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are
asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to
insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their
senses would seriously communicate with each other. The fact that ghosts prefer
darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers
prefer darkness disproves the existence of love. If you choose to say, "I
will believe that Miss Brown called her fiance a periwinkle or, any other
endearing term, if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists,"
then I shall reply, "Very well, if those are your conditions, you will
never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it." It is just as
unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic
atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise. It is as if I said
that I could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough;
or as if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.
As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to
which we come about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must
in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen. I am
forced to it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter
elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen,
farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men
who testify to spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists, the fact
that science itself admits such things more and more every day. Science will
even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit
the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it. I suggest the
Regalvanisation. But the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that
these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of
anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism—I may say materialist mysticism. The
sceptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not
be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. For I hope we may
dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere recapitulation of
frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That is not an argument at all,
good or bad. A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a
forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England— if anything, it
proves its existence.
Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena
do occur (my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide with
one of the worst mental evils of the age. The greatest disaster of the
nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word
"spiritual" as the same as the word "good." They thought
that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. When
scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere
animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to
think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the
angel. But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius, very
typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benjamin Disraeli
was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was indeed; he was
on the side of the fallen angels. He was not on the side of any mere appetite
or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the
princes of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery, and contempt
of all obvious good. Between this sunken pride and the towering humilities of
heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in
encountering them, must make much the same mistakes that he makes in
encountering any other varied types in any other distant continent. It must be
hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate. If a shade arose
from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly, that shade would not quite
understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose that the
coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking
and imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we
may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to find the gods; they are
obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods. We must have a long
historic experience in supernatural phenomena— in order to discover which are
really natural. In this light I find the history of Christianity, and even of
its Hebrew origins, quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be
told that the Hebrew god was one among many. I know he was, without any
research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the
sun and the moon looked the same size. It is only slowly that we learn that the
sun is immeasurably our master, and the small moon only our satellite.
Believing that there is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the
world of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good. Just as I
should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the North Pole to make a
comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find
something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until I find some place
in eternity, where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to
be found.
I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom
such an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena of
apologetics, a ground of belief. In pure records of experiment (if these be
taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that
miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition.
But I will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real reason for
accepting Christianity instead of taking the moral good of Christianity as I
should take it out of Confucianism.
I have another far more solid and central ground
for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as
a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation
to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me
yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly
the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning
of the shape of the mitre. One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed;
some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a
truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but
Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to
live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an
original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter
everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he
believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and
Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth
that he has never seen before. There is one only other parallel to this
position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your
father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt
sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees
stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt
sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining
(perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No:
you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of
facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you
truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was
even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is
dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of
women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of
women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes
futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to
teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is
nearly always done by women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born. They
talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men
walk to Westminster to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join
their procession.
For I remember with certainty this fixed
psychological fact; that the very time when I was most under a woman's
authority, I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my
mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter
(as she said); therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful
fulfilments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after
prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a
terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no
clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is
not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly
because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn.
Inch by inch I might discover what was the object of the ugly shape called a
rake; or form some shadowy conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat.
So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother
and not merely as a chance example, I have found Europe and the world once more
like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake; I
look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or that
rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found
by experience that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman
may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there
must be some strange reason for his existence. I give one instance out of a
hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for
physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity.
But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm
is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high
human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved
Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the
great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the
central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking
sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual
innocence— the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children
will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With
all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply
conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective,
while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does
not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the
celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human
experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one
flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or
terrible name. But I may be told it any day.
This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for
accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of
the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that
truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies
say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and
again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all
creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right,
like my father in the garden. Theosophists for instance will preach an
obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical
results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For if a
man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the
beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as
original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and
brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we
can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king. Men of science offer us
health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by
health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium. Orthodoxy makes us jump
by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we realise that jumping
was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health. It is only afterwards
that we realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance. The
strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. The
unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of
the people. The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical
abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find
the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for
Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy
the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and
emancipated; its despair is within.
And its despair is this, that it does not really
believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to
find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any
adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of
adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority. One can find no
meanings in a jungle of scepticism; but the man will find more and more
meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design. Here everything has
a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house; for
it is my father's house. I end where I began—at the right end. I have entered
at last the gate of all good philosophy. I have come into my second childhood.
But this larger and more adventurous Christian
universe has one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the
whole matter I will attempt to express it. All the real argument about religion
turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when
he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary
condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself
is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall. In Sir Oliver
Lodge's interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were: "What are
you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?" I
remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but I soon
found that they were very broken and agnostic answers. To the question,
"What are you?" I could only answer, "God knows." And to
the question, "What is meant by the Fall?" I could answer with
complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself." This is
the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full
sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us
than ourselves. And there is really no test of this except the merely
experimental one with which these pages began, the test of the padded cell and
the open door. It is only since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental
emancipation. But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the
ultimate idea of joy.
It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and
Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure
sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere.
Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of
interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. And the
really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and
happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the
heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or
Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful
humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin.
To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of
the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan
looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who
are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse
than deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world
was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are
right. For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened with
incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern
than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns
have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals
were happy about that at least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the
moderns, were only miserable about everything—they were quite jolly about
everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at
peace about everything—they were at war about everything else. But if the
question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic
contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of
Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than
Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.
The mass of men have been forced to be gay about
the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last
dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is
more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the
superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive
frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism
is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all
things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan
or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy
ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must
cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for
the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is
what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be
topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his
brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the
earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very
weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity
satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right
way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something
gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not
deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence
of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and
pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps
permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of
divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own
tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So
we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the
heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan,
is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I
open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am
again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the
Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who
ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The
Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never
concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily
sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something.
Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger.
He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the
Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He
restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering
personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He
hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that
He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some
one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth;
and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
