National idealism and a state church : a constructive essay in religion

Preface

Speaking of St Paul's idea of the Lord's Supper as the unifying sign of fellowship among members of the Church, Dean Armitage Robinson says : " Paul, in this as in so many other instances, arrived at his interpretation through the exigencies of his special mission. His task of welding into one the Jewish and Gentile elements led him to develop the conception of the corporate unity of all Christians. Food has ever been the token of unity — the bond of equal intercourse. Refusal to take food toP-ether is the symbol of exclusiveness and caste distinction. The Jew could not, by the later Pharisaic ordinances, eat with the Gentile. If Christ were for Jew and Gentile alike, the Eucharist, the feast of the new and all-inclusive 'covenant,' must be the common meal of Jew and Gentile. This in itself must have given it to Paul a special significance."

I cite this passage because the principle underlying its reasoning contains the only apology I am anxious to offer for this book. I have arrived at my interpretation of the religious needs of England to-day through the exigencies of the work which now for well-nigh a score of years I have been carrying on in founding the Moral Instruction Leagye and a number of Ethical Societies. The ideas in this book, if they have not been " hewn from life," at vu

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PREFACE least owe their peculiarities, and what to many may seem their angularities, to my twenty years of constructive effort in ethical preaching and organising.

Whatever occasion for offence others may find in my doctrines, no one, I am sure, can fail to see that for me they are spiritually inevitable. They are not the result of merely abstract reasoning or of any love of paradox. Nor have 1 met with such success as could throw a glamour about them before my eyes. Indeed, the more nearly my efforts have approached to failure, the deeper and steadier has become my conviction that the principles which I am trying to spread and which I advocate as a new foundation in thought for the historic Church, are essentially true and are worth working for in the scorn of consequence. Accordingly, whatever adverse criticism I may receive, I have no fear that anyone whose own convictions are the outgrowth of his own inner experience will think my book lacking in fundamental piety or in that sense of responsibility which every man ought to feel who presumes to re-interpret religious traditions.

But the passage I have quoted from Dean Robinson furnishes not only an apology for a book like this. It suggests an inspiring analogy between Paul's mission and that of any man devoted to the task of transforming England into an organic unit of religious life. From that task is not lacking even the identical problem which confronted St Paul — the separation of Jew and Gentile. Not only in this, however, but in the many other cases of religious antagonism and misunderstanding within our nation, the duty of the hour is to find the bond of equal intercourse. Yes, and not only the bond but the symbol of the bond, that we may replace the symbol of exclusiveness and sectarian distinction by that of spiritual union.

Except that in the present contingency a new unifying

PREFACE

IX symbol is an absolute necessity, there would have been no occasion, in treating of National Idealism and a State Church, to give to the question of ritual the prominence I have here assigned it. But indeed, so all-important seems to me the problem of Church services and rites, that I shall shortly publish a volume entitled " National Idealism and the Book of Common Prayer," with the object of calling attention to the claims, if not of my solution, at least of the difficulty that waits to be solved.

S. C.

October^ igoj.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE ........ vii

1. CHURCH DISCIPLINE AND PERSONAL RELIGION . I

Chapter I Church Discipline And Personal Religion

Our age is turning more and more away from the oldtime habit of trust in intelligent beings other than man. But there is by no means a corresponding decline of the sense of individual frailty. On the contrary, never was the consciousness of duty left undone so deep and widespread. Not that men have become worse, but they have been facing themselves more unflinchingly. They have more carefully weighed themselves in the balances, with the result that they know better than before by how much they are wanting. And never was the need of regular means of inward discipline so strongly felt. Men realise the necessity of taking themselves in hand betimes. But the help they once expected from invisible and incorporeal agencies they are now demanding, with the enthusiasm of a new faith, from their fellow-mortals. Although each be blind and weak, it is felt that infinite is the help, both material and spiritual, which man collectively can give to man individually.

Among the morally intelligent, religion is accordingly ceasing to be looked upon as a merely private and individual concernment.

I

Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, those who had discarded communion with supernatural beings inclined to the belief that adequate consolation could be drawn by each person from the inner recesses of his own soul. The profounder life of the human spirit was supposed to be of such a nature that to attempt to communicate it was to expose it to degradation. " We descend to meet," said Emerson. To crave religious communion with one's fellow-mortals was thought to be a denial of the sufficiency of one's own inner store of spiritual wealth. Solitude and the vastness of isolation were the only immensities befitting the self-contained soul. Those who discarded communion with supernatural beings thus withdrew into themselves. But whole classes in the community who have retained a belief in a personal Creator and in the traditional teachings of the Church have also inclined in recent years to count fellowship with other human beings in religious practices as superfluous. The very fact that they find the consolations of fellowship in communion with personal agencies outside of the social organism of mankind, has made them the more ready to dispense with religious communion with other men. Within the churches themselves church discipline has, except in special centres, been more and more falling into disrepute. Many have interpreted this tendency as indicating and involving a decline of religious conviction. But such an interpretation is incorrect. The religious life has become less social, but there is no corresponding decrease of ancient belief. Such a reaction upon inward convictions would surely have followed in the course of time. But no one can have become acquainted, for instance, with the religious life of Germany during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and not have noticed that although, as compared with England and America, the

Church has dwindled almost to the vanishing-point, there has not taken place anything like a corresponding decrease of belief in the existence of a personal Creator or in the divinity of Jesus Christ, or of reverence for the Bible. The truth is that the doctrine of individualism has been injuring church life, yet has been having the effect temporarily of intensifying the religious devotion of those who already had attained an individualised spiritual consciousness of their own. It has injured church life in the same way that in politics it had been working against the full functioning of the State. By the year 1 860 the doctrine of laisser-faire had caused the Government of England to restrict itself almost entirely to police duties. A century before, the Constitution of America had in similar manner been framed under such suspicion of State regulation that the Government was not given full powers of sovereignty. No wonder that the Church has similarly suffered. Nor is it a wonder that individuals pre-eminently religious by nature, accepting the doctrine of individualism, have interpreted religion as a merely private concern, and have therefore considered all corporate action, even when voluntary, as a violation of the religious spirit.

This idea has so prepossessed the mind of Professor William James that in his brilliantly suggestive book on Varieties of Religious Experience he begins his investigation of " personal religion " only after setting aside churches and all their works as irrelevant. He justifies this procedure on the ground that ecclesiastical organisation emanates from individual religious geniuses, but that individual religious genius does not itself arise from contact with church organisation. " A survey of history," he says, " shows us that as a rule religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathisers. When these groups get strong enough to ' organise '

themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing ; so that when we hear the word ' religion ' nowadays, we think inevitably of some * church ' or other ; . . . . but in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast. First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely ; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go."

Now, in the name of history, I protest that all conclusions drawn from this premise are rendered worthless by the initial blunder of imagining that ecclesiastical institutions have no significant and helpful bearing upon the inmost religious experience. It is the very opposite of truth to say that such experience comes into the world " lonely." There never was a great religious innovator who was not nourished and fostered, as it were, at the bosom and in the very heart of an ecclesiastical organisation. Jesus was conceived in the womb of Judaism ; Savonarola and Luther of Catholicism ; Wesley of Anglicanism. They all loved their spiritual mother the Church. Their very innovations were for her sake. Their sacrifice was for her. Not one single religious genius known to history discovered and brought forth, in isolation and by direct unmediated communion with the Infinite, "the originally innocent thing" which the

Church at first perhaps failed to appreciate and afterwards adopted. Nor has any religious genius known to history ever been the product of what is called " the world " as distinct from the Church. Even the withdrawing into the wilderness on the part of religious innovators was a taking with them of the precious secret of the ecclesiastical organisation, that they might penetrate deeper into its spirit.

It is quite unwarrantable, therefore, for a psychologist to imagine that a man's mind is isolated from social institutions simply because he has withdrawn for a period to meditate. Even George Fox did not get by isolation the new truth he uttered, but by contact with the quickening social life of his time, when all England was a Church and religious controversy filled every nook and corner of the nation. Thousands were feeling what they could not express. In him, exquisitely sensitive as he was to the needs of the social organism about him, these feelings became conscious, articulate and effective.

If it were impossible for Professor James to see the whole historic truth that personal experience comes from church organisation as much as church organisation grows out of someone's personal experience — if he could only see half of this truth — it is a great pity that he should have seen the less significant part, and devoted his popular gifts to that side of it which can never bear fruit unto life. The world's need is to know under what controllable conditions geniuses with fresh religious experience appear in society. If society knew that, it would bring forth a thousand where now, by haphazard, it produces only one.

If we are ever to deepen personal religious experience, it will be by intensifying, developing and systematising church discipline. Only ecclesiastical institutions quicken religious emotion and clarify religious insight to the degree that drives men, stung with the splendour of new vision, into the desert, and then back again into the slums of the city, their plans now thought out and their purposes and policy fixed and matured. If we want a Jesus to reappear on earth, some nation like England must do for five centuries what the Jewish theocracy did for as long a time as that — focus the attention and desire of men and women by means of a Temple service, in expectation of faith, upon the necessity of a deliverer. As regards Savonarola, if we think of the Catholic Church as consisting not only of the immediate phase which dominated in Italy in his day, but of the whole reach back to the time of Jesus, and even through Judaism to Isaiah, we cannot deny that all that was new and most characteristic in Savonarola was old and most distinctive in the Church. The same is true of Luther. Had he not been a monk, he never could have made Germany. Likewise of Wesley. It was no accident that such unique experience of religion at first hand as his came to one whose father and mother both were preachers and fanatics of church discipline, as were also his remoter ancestors, and that he was bred in Oxford, the very hotbed of ecclesiasticism.

How could anyone, in the face of these well-known facts, write a book on personal religious experience from the point of view that ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern it at all ? Even Emerson, with his fresh democratic American gospel of self-trust, never could have gained his unique penetration and insight had he not been trained to be a preacher to an organised religious body, had he not studied at a university founded to make preachers for a religious organisation, and had he not sprung from generations of such preachers. Nor is it a mere coincidence that the founder of the first Ethical

Society, Professor Felix Adler, was educated to become a Jewish rabbi, and was descended from a line of Jewish rabbis centuries long.

The truth which a study of the historic facts brings to light is that great heretics, as well as the most powerful defenders of the old order, are formed only at the very heart of ecclesiastical institutions, and that heresies are but vital modifications in the spirit of the old order, due to a new intellectual and social environment, to meet for the Church's sake exigencies of the coming hour. The spirit of orthodoxy and the spirit of heresy are one ; the opposite of both is worldly indifference. Let heretics remember their kinship with orthodox enthusiasts. Let them beware ; for if they destroy instead of preserving ecclesiastical institutions, they will kill the goose that lays their golden egg. Instead of live humanitarian idealism there will remain only the dead matter of selfish conventionality. It is as unscientific to think that fresh spiritual insight can be gained in isolation from organised religious bodies as to imagine that scientific discoveries and inventions like those of radium and wireless telegraphy will come to men and women who have been kept all their lives aloof from chemical and physical laboratories and from the great educational institutions of technical researcfi.

This error is the more astonishing at the beginning of the era when at last the law of cause and effect and the idea of the spiritual interdependence of mankind have taken practical hold of all the great thinkers of the world.

A lamentable effect of Professor James's position is that, by commending spiritual isolation, it unwittingly panders to vanity, egotism and the fantastic vapourings of incipient insanity. Except for its magnifying of each individual reader's importance in spiritual experience, Professor James's book would hardly have received so widespread and cordial a welcome among the preachers of aU denominations. The one thing which these men presumably are attempting to build up is church organisation ; yet this is the one thing which, according to Professor William James, has hardly any concern with first-hand personal religious experience. The truth is. Professor James has been a victim of a false and therefore transient individualism. His psychology has been blind to the fact (for us as patent as the day) that those whose minds are most self-reliant, intuitive and creative are the ones most sensitively receptive to the higher tendency of the age and society in which they live. When they were least aware of drawing spiritual vitality from the community about them, then most was the common life streaming into them and invigorating them.

During the last ten years, however (despite recent publications to the contrary by men of an earlier generation), not only has the main trend of enlightenment been away from communion with superhuman agencies, but the religious geniuses of our day have at the same time become painfully aware that they have no ethical life apart from the men and women who constitute the world about them. They know that if from these they cannot derive the inspiration which men in former times undoubtedly did receive under the discipline of the old religious practices, their souls must wither at the root. But they are beginning to realise that a man may get spiritual sus-tenance from others, although he be under the illusion that he is drawing the waters of life from some inner well unsupplied from social sources. They are becoming convinced that those who attribute their salvation to supernatural agents and to the belief in such are in fact deriving their power and enthusiasm ultimately not from within any more than from above, but from round about — from the spiritual reservoir of their nation, their city, their church, and, through Hterature and history, from the past of human society carried over and flowing on into the present time.

Now, it may be contended that a man can be spiritually in touch with the religious life of his times although he be not a member of any religious organisation. He may go from one religious meeting to another and hear all the preachers of his town. In periodical literature and books he may follow the great controversies of the day on theology. Through the daily Press he may become aware of all the currents and cross-currents, the main stream and all the eddies and back-waters of the spiritual consciousness of the time. What, therefore, it may be asked, is the need of his entering into the intimacy, the routine and the dogmatism of active membership in any one church organisation ? Let him spare himself such trammels, and in the freedom of independence let him draw vitality from all the sources round about him. By thus holding aloof and yet remaining receptive he would avoid all the disadvantages, pettinesses and corruptions which inevitably manifest themselves in the life of any organised body of human beings, and yet gain that which is highest and of enduring worth in them all.

In answer to this contention 1 would ask, Is it likely that any man who has never been nurtured at the bosom of a religious organisation, or has left it when he was eighteen or twenty years of age, could or would cultivate that closeness of touch with the religious life of the whole community, which would be needed to enable him to obtain a correct understanding and an enthusiasm for religion ? All experience proves that a person who is lo NATIONAL IDEALISM •

outside an organised society never can possibly gain an intimacy with its principles, aims and methods. However much he tries, he will remain veritably an outsider, and all those who are in the secrets and under the discipline of the organisation will realise that he has missed something that is essential to a correct understanding. Still less does experience justify the notion that a man born in the wilderness or remaining there more than a very brief period — let us say forty days — will continue to have any inner religious life at all. The very organs of religion in his spirit will become atrophied or petrified. After twenty years of isolation he may be a fanatic, but he will be a fanatic whom every member of organised life will know to pity rather than respect. He will have no message for his age or any other age, because messages come from that source from which he has cut himself off.

Would Professor James maintain in regard to scientific insight and enthusiasm that it also lives itself out within the private breast unrelated to the organised scientific life of the community .'' If a man makes great discoveries in chemistry or physics, is it not due, at least in our age of more than primitive knowledge, to his discipline and discipleship in scientific organisations .'' Does he not, in withdrawing for greater concentration on some special problem, take with him the whole tradition and apparatus of scientific investigation ? Further, is it not true that if in his isolated investigation he remains long aloof and falls out of touch with what other scientific men are doing in the privacy of scientific organisations but have not yet published to the lay world, he will be overtaken, and left a veritable fossil .''

In science it is inconceivable how a man can make new discoveries, can manifest original insight which shall add to the world's knowledge, if he be not a member, or has

DISCIPLINE AND RELIGION ii

not been a member for the greater part of his life, of those social bodies of specialists which are pursuing the same lines of investigation as himself. What, then, is this strange difference implied by Professor James between insight and enthusiasm for religion and insight and enthusiasm for physical science, that would make him cast something very like contempt upon ecclesiastical organisations ? For surely Professor James would not for a moment speak of physical and chemical laboratories, technical and scientific schools and universities, as not themselves contributing to the wisdom and enthusiasm of scientific geniuses, but only springing up in the trail of such meteors ? It must be remembered that the sentences which I have quoted from Professor James, in which he waves aside ecclesiastical organisations as not producing but being only produced by religious geniuses, contain no merely passing observation, but are introduced to justify the entire omission from his whole volume of any tracing of spiritual conversions and illuminations to the action of churches upon the innermost centre of men's souls.

The idea of the self-made man in science, in art or in literature, has been for ever exploded. But as religion is still more complicated and the religious tradition of the world still longer and more complex and involved than its scientific or artistic interest, surely the self-made man in religion, in proportion as he is self-made, must be more grotesque and impossible than in other domains of human effort. Indeed, one may trace ninety-nine per cent, of all the follies and vanities of devoutly religious men to the notion that somehow in religion one need not take counsel of one's fellow-men either for warning or example, but may open up in isolation infinite inner sources of light and life.

It may be true that ecclesiastical organisations begin to develop corporate ambitions of their own, and that the spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule enter and contaminate the originally innocent thing. But is not this imperfection equally to be noted in schools, in universities, in cities, in states, in families, in business organisations ? Yet would anybody expect a man to become richer or more learned or more civic by standing outside these imperfect institutions than by entering into them ? Furthermore, does a historic knowledge of churches lead us to think that churches are any more corrupt than other social bodies ? And does not a knowledge of other social bodies lead us to think that their ambitions, their politics, and their lust of domination are often more than offset by a still greater development of their true ends and methods ? Harvard University, if one knew intimately its inside workings, would show its fair proportion of frailties and corruptions. Yet in the eyes of the whole world Harvard University stands not for these, but as the foster-mother of such geniuses as Professor William James. If he be right in this one particular as to the relation of private religion to ecclesiastical organisations, it must be — since churches are not more corrupt than other social bodies — that condemnation should be equally visited upon all organisations. Accordingly, the practical conclusion would be that specialists in psychology should break away from professorial chairs. Yet Professor James's judgment is right in regard to universities. And religious geniuses who enter the Church will not only enter to remain laymen but to become professors and officials.

I would further ask. Can anyone cite the case of a human being who has devoted his life to religion and yet whose childhood was not passed among people who were active members of some church ? If his own parents were not such, were not his teachers at school ? Did he not come under the daily influence of some priest or preacher, or did not some other religious enthusiast, solicitous for the welfare of his soul, seek him out and inspire and direct him and try to draw him into church fellowship ? Did any religious genius thus in contact with the organised ecclesiastical bodies about him remain aloof from them, and yet systematically and persistently keep up his interest in religion ? Confident of the answer which every student of religious biography must give, I ask, Did not such religious geniuses not only enter into some one of the ecclesiastical organisations, but even push forward to the very altar, seeking and taking holy orders, becoming not only active members but positive leaders and, as it were, professional heads of the church ?

Again I would meet Professor James's individualism by the answer which must be given to the question. Does not every Innovator and heretic in religion derive his followers not from " the world," not from the non-religious and unorganised public, but directly from those who have long undergone the discipline of church communion ? Or from those who, having long lived in religious fellowship with others and having found the spirit of religion germinating into original life in their own souls, have under dictation from the new centre of life within withdrawn into temporary isolation, but now gladly co-operate with the fellow-innovator who Is voicing their own living convictions ? I give testimony, as one having attempted to organise ethical societies — which in their name and originally in the utterances of their leaders made no show of being religious bodies — that generally those wlio have responded to the call of the Ethical Movement have been already prepared for its gospel by devout and regular discipline within the historic churches. It is not the man of the world, it is not the Isolated Agnostic, it is not the individualist, who knows how to appreciate the new revelation that has come in his own day. The men who have always been outside of churches may care for music or painting or the drama or athletics or wealth. But they have been too much occupied with these concerns ever to have attended Intimately to the new religious promptings of their own innermost souls.

It would be a pity If, as the result of the wide popularity of Professor James's Varieties of Religious Experience^ the impression should arise and become fixed, that the psychology of religious experience by its very method and on account of the nature of the religious life is necessarily individualistic. It Is perfectly consistent with the psychological study of the Innermost, Intensest, and most original religious experience to trace that experience to the nutrition and protection which the ecclesiastical organisation gives to the growing soul. It is as consistent with psychology so to do as It is with biology to study the life In embryo of each individual animal organism, and to trace its nutrition and its protection to the environing and vitalising organism of the mother. When the new organism has become wholly severed, then of course it Is relatively free ; Its vitality cannot again become dependent upon that of the parent. Yet this very independence is undeniably the result of Its prior vital dependence. Although I conceive the church to be the cause of Intuitive revelations and of religious reactions against the organisations of religion, I admit that the Innermost experience of the soul, when fully ripe, is vitally self-sufficient. Nevertheless, it Is so because within the church organisation a long period of gestation had been taking place. The organisation was feeding the soul life of the individual, until it should itself reach an inner state when it could react against the parent and break off and be free. So patent are these facts that one wonders whether Professor William James has not been rendered blind to them by some unconscious bias. It would almost seem as if he had approached his investigation of personal religion on the presupposition that its phenomena are the manifestation of occult powers in the soul which are not to be derived from the environing social organism of mankind, but which emanate directly from a transcendent and super-sensible world of spirits. / A person holding such a belief might naturally become incapable of seeing the historic social causes of inner experiences.