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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77050 ***



                            DOES CIVILIZATION
                             NEED RELIGION?

                    _A Study in the Social Resources
                       and Limitations of Religion
                             in Modern Life_


                                   BY
                            REINHOLD NIEBUHR


                                NEW YORK
                          THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                                  1927
                          _All rights reserved_


                            Copyright, 1927,
                        By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

                        Set up and electrotyped.
                        Published December, 1927.


                  SET UP BY BROWN BROTHERS, LINOTYPERS
              _Printed in the United States of America by_
                  THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK




                       TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

                     WHO TAUGHT ME THAT THE CRITICAL
                      FACULTY CAN BE UNITED WITH A
                             REVERENT SPIRIT

                                  _and_

                              TO MY MOTHER

                     WHO FOR TWELVE YEARS HAS SHARED
                          WITH ME THE WORK OF A
                           CHRISTIAN PASTORATE




                                CONTENTS


       CHAPTER                                                  PAGE

    I. The State of Religion in Modern Society                     1

   II. Nature and Civilization as Foes of Personality             19

  III. The Social Resources of Religion                           35

   IV. The Social Conservatism of Modern Religion                 63

    V. Religion and Life: Conflict and Compromise                 79

   VI. Social Complexity and Ethical Impotence                   124

  VII. Transcending and Transforming the World                   165

 VIII. A Philosophical Basis for an Ethical Religion             190

   IX. Conclusion                                                220




                    DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION?




                    DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION?




                               CHAPTER I

                THE STATE OF RELIGION IN MODERN SOCIETY


Religion is not in a robust state of health in modern civilization.
Vast multitudes, particularly in industrial and urban centers, live
without seeking its sanctions for their actions and die without
claiming its comforts in their extremities. While its influence is
still considerable among agrarians and the middle classes of the city,
an ever-increasing number of the privileged classes are indifferent to
its values. Spiritual and moral forces have always been in a perennial
state of decay in those circles of society in which physical ease and
cultural advantages combine to make intellectual scruples more pressing
than moral ones. But modern scientific education has greatly multiplied
the intellectual difficulties of religion and the increasing opulence
of Western life has rendered its moral problems more perplexing.
Industrial workers, in as far as they are socially self-conscious,
are almost universally inimical to religion, and their opposition
represents a type of anti-religious sentiment which is entirely new in
history.

Since the dawn of the modern era the tides of faith have ebbed and
flowed so that it is not easy to chart their general course; but it
is difficult to escape the conclusion that each new tide has barely
exceeded the mark left by a previous ebb. The stream of religious life
has been deepened at times, as in the Protestant Reformation, but the
impartial observer will note that it has been narrowed as well. A
psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism and modernism are
symptoms, has gripped the forces of religion. Extreme orthodoxy betrays
by its very frenzy that the poison of scepticism has entered the soul
of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties
when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a
method for obscuring doubt. Liberalism tries vainly to give each new
strategic retreat the semblance of a victorious engagement. To retreat
from untenable positions is no doubt a necessary step in preparation
for new advances; but this necessary strategy has not been accompanied
by the kind of spiritual vigor which would promise ultimate victory.
The general tendencies toward the secularization of life have been
consistent enough to prompt its foes to predict religion’s ultimate
extinction as a major interest of mankind and to tempt even friendly
observers to regard its future with grave apprehension. There are
indeed many forms of religion which are clearly vestigial remnants of
another day with other interests. They have no vital influence upon
the life of modern man, and their continued existence only proves that
history, like nature, is slow to destroy what it has found useless, and
even slower to inter what it has destroyed. Scattered among the living
forms of each civilization are the whitened bones of what was once
flesh and blood.

The sickness of faith in our day may be the senility which precedes
death; on the other hand, it may be a specific malady which time
and thought can cure. If history is slow to destroy what has become
useless, it may be as patient and persistent in reviving what is
useful but seems dead. Five hundred years are but a short span in
history, and a constant tendency over such a period may lead to
premature conclusions. If religion contains indispensable resources
for the life of man, its revival waits only upon the elimination of
those maladjustments which have hindered it from making its resources
available for the citizen of the modern era. Whatever may be said of
specific religions and religious forms, it is difficult to imagine
man without religion; for religion is the champion of personality in
a seemingly impersonal world. It prompts man to organize his various
impulses, inherited and acquired, into a moral unity; it persuades
him, when its vitality is unimpaired, to regard his fellows with an
appreciation commensurate with his own self-respect; and it finally
discovers and creates a universe in which the human spirit is
guaranteed security against the forces of nature which always seem to
reduce it to a mere effervescence unable to outlast the collocation of
forces which produced it. The plight of religion in our own day is due
to the fact that it has been more than ordinarily pressed by foes on
the two lines on which it defends the dignity and value of personality.
The sciences have greatly complicated the problem of maintaining the
plausibility of the personalization of the universe by which religion
guarantees the worth of human personality; and science applied to the
world’s work has created a type of society in which human personality
is easily debased. The pure sciences have revealed a world of nature
much more impersonal and, seemingly, much less amenable to a divine
will and to human needs than had been traditionally assumed; and the
applied sciences have created an impersonal civilization in which human
relations are so complex, its groups and units so large, its processes
so impersonal, the production of things so important, and ethical
action so difficult, that personality is both dwarfed and outraged in
it.

Personality is that type of reality which is self-conscious and
self-determining. The concept of personality is valid only in a
universe in which creative freedom is developed and maintained in
individual life as well as in the universe. Religion therefore needs
the support of both metaphysics and ethics. It tries to prompt man to
ethical action by the sublime assumption that the universe is itself
ethical in its ultimate nature whatever data to the contrary the
immediate and obvious scene may reveal; and through the cultivation
of the ethical life in man it seeks to make such a personalization
of the universe both necessary and plausible. It teaches men to find
God by loving their brothers, and to love their brothers because
they have found God. It inspires a mystical reverence for human
personality, prompted by the discovery and creation of a universe in
which personality is the supreme power and value; and it persuades men
to discover personal values in the universe because they have first
come upon clues to the transcendent value of personality in the lives
of their fellows. Its ethics is dependent upon its metaphysics and its
metaphysics is rooted in its ethics. Religion is thus obviously placed
in a desperate plight when its metaphysics and its ethics are imperiled
at the same time. It must face and do battle with two hosts of enemies,
those who do not believe in men because they do not believe in God, and
those who do not believe in God because modern civilization has robbed
them of their faith in the moral integrity of men.

Since it is difficult to fight on two fronts at the same time,
the forces of religion have been forced to choose one of the two
fronts for their major defensive effort. Perhaps it was inevitable
that they should choose the easier task. It is easier to challenge
the idea of an impersonal universe than to change the fact of an
impersonal civilization. That is what the modern church has done and
is doing. It is spending all its energy in discounting the excessive
claims of a deterministic science. It has exhausted its ingenuity
in retreating from the untenable positions of an orthodoxy which
overstated the freedom and the virtue in the physical universe and
therefore aggravated the very determinism by which it was defeated.
Outraged truth has a way of avenging itself. The idea of a capricious
God working his will in the universe without the restraint of law or
the hindrance of any circumstance helped to create the concept of a
mechanistic world in which all freedom is an illusion and therefore all
morality a sham. Thus the strategic retreats of religion in the field
of metaphysics have been the necessary prelude to any new religious
advance. Religion may in fact be forced to make some concessions
which even modern liberalism seems still unwilling to make. Modern
religionists, particularly popular apologists are inclined to add the
word creative to the word evolution, and assume that their problem is
solved. The modern church has very generally borrowed its apologetic
strategy from John Fiske and Henry Drummond, and has tried to
visualize a God who differed from older conception only in this—that
he took more time to gain his ends than had once been assumed. The
important fact which has escaped many modern defenders of the faith is
that the patience of the creative will is a necessary characteristic
rather than a self-imposed restraint. There is a stubborn inertia in
every type of reality which offers resistance to each new step in
creation, so that an emerging type of reality is always in some sense
a compromise between the creative will and the established facts of
the concrete world. Whether we view the inorganic world, organic life
or the world of personal and moral values, each new type of reality
represents in some sense a defeat of God as well as a revelation of
him. Religious apologetics will probably be forced to concede this fact
more generously than has been its wont before it can bring religious
affirmations into harmony with scientific facts. Modern liberalism is
steeped in a religious optimism which is true to the facts of neither
the world of nature nor the world of history. The ultimate worth of
human personality in the universe may not be guaranteed as immediately
nor as obviously as liberal religion seems inclined to assume. Liberal
religion may be forced to discard its metaphysical and theological
monisms, which have been its support even more than orthodoxy’s, and
concede that freedom and creativity in both man and the cosmic order
are more seriously circumscribed than religion had assumed. But after
that concession is made it is not likely that the idea of freedom, and
the dignity of personality which is associated with it, will ever be
completely discredited, whatever may be the deterministic obsessions of
modern science. The various sciences can momentarily afford to indulge
in their various determinisms because the prestige of metaphysics as
a coördinator of the sciences has been destroyed for the time being.
Each science is therefore able to disavow the authority of metaphysics
and work upon the basis of its own metaphysical assumptions, which
are usually unreflective and generally deterministic. But the bulk
of new knowledge which has momentarily destroyed the authority of
any unifying perspective must in time be mastered by philosophical
thought; and absolute determinism is bound to be discredited in such a
development.[1]

There can be no question but that the development of the physical
sciences has permanently increased the difficulty of justifying the
personalization of the universe upon which all religious affirmations
are based. Every new form of reality is so closely linked to every
preceding form out of which it emerges that it is not easy to discern
the place where free creativity functions. Yet no total view of reality
can ever be permanently mechanistic, for new types of reality do emerge
and science is able to explain only the process and not the cause of
their emergence.

Important, then, as the metaphysical problem of religion is, it is
not the only problem which it faces. Though it is a real task to
reinterpret religious truth in the light of modern science, it is by
no means a hopeless one; and though it is necessary, it is not the
only necessary task. In the light of modern philosophical inquiries it
is justifiable to assume that the most needed hypotheses of religion
are metaphysically defensible. In the present situation of religion
in civilization, it is more necessary to inquire if and how the
peculiar attitudes and the unique life which proceeds from a religious
interpretation of the universe may be made to serve the needs of men in
modern civilization. The fact is that more men in our modern era are
irreligious because religion has failed to make civilization ethical
than because it has failed to maintain its intellectual respectability.
For every person who disavows religion because some ancient and
unrevised dogma outrages his intelligence, several become irreligious
because the social impotence of religion outrages their conscience.
Religion never lacks moral fruits so long as it has any vitality. It
has been placed in such a sorry plight in fulfilling its ethical task
in modern civilization because the mechanization of society has made
an ethical life for the individual at once more necessary and more
difficult, and failure more obvious, than in any previous civilization.
If we are not less ethical than our fathers, our happiness is certainly
more dependent than that of our fathers upon the ethical character of
our society. Rapid means of commerce and communication have brought
us into terms of intimacy with all the world without increasing the
spiritual dynamic and ethical intelligence which makes such close
contact sufferable. We have multiplied the tools of destruction which a
confused conscience may wield and have thus armed the world of nature
which lives in the soul of man by the same science by which we imagined
ourselves to have conquered nature. We have developed so complex a
society that it cannot be made ethical by moral goodwill alone, if
moral purpose is not astutely guided. Lacking social intelligence,
modern civilization has thus robbed man of confidence in his own
and his neighbor’s moral integrity even when ethical motives were
not totally lacking. Civilization with its impersonal and mechanized
relationships tends on the one hand to make society less ethical,
and on the other to reveal its immoralities more vividly than in any
previous age. Religion has a relation to both cause and effect to the
moral life. Both its friends and its foes are inclined to judge it
by its moral fruits, regarding it as primarily the root, fancied or
real, of morality. Yet morality is as much the root as the fruit of
religion; for religious sentiment develops out of moral experience
and religious convictions are the logic by which moral life justifies
itself. In a civilization in which the dominant motives and basic
relationships are unethical, religion is therefore doubly affected.
The immoralities which bring the reproach of impotence upon it are
also the reason for the impotence. Thus modern civilization creates
a temper of scorn for a religion which fails to challenge recognized
social iniquities, and at the same time it destroys the vitality
which religion needs to issue such a challenge. The defection of the
industrial workers from religious life and institutions, one of the
most significant phenomena of our time, has this double significance.
The industrial worker is indifferent to religion, partly because he
is enmeshed in relations which are so impersonal and fundamentally so
unethical that his religious sense atrophies in him. On the other hand
he is hostile to religion because he observes the ethical impotence of
the religion of the privileged classes, particularly in its failure to
effect improvement in economic and social attitudes. The industrial
worker raises a general characteristic of modern urban man to a unique
degree. His own experiences help him to see the moral limitations of
modern civilization more clearly than do the more privileged classes;
but what is true of him is generally true of all members of a complex
society in which human relations are impersonal and complicated. If
religion is senescent in modern civilization, its social impotence is
as responsible for its decline as is its metaphysical maladjustment.

The restoration of its vitality must wait upon the adjustment of
its tenets and the reorganization of its life to meet the problems
which both the pure and the applied sciences, which both the
depersonalization of the universe and the depersonalization of
civilization, have created. The metaphysical problem of religion cannot
be depreciated. In the long run religion must be able to impress the
mind of modern man with the essential plausibility and scientific
respectability of its fundamental affirmations. But the scientific
respectability of religious affirmations will not avail if the life
which issues from them will not help to solve man’s urgent social
problems. If modern churches continue to prefer their intellectual
to their ethical problems, they will merely succeed in maintaining a
vestige of religion in those classes which are not sensitive enough to
feel and not unfortunate enough to suffer from the moral limitations
of modern society. An unethical civilization will inevitably destroy
the vitality of the religion of the victims and the sincerity and
moral prestige of the religion of the beneficiaries of its unethical
inequalities.

The future of religion and the future of civilization are thus hung
in the same balance. Both as a means to a moral end and as an end in
itself, for which the moral life is the means, the future of religion
is involved in the ethical reconstruction of modern society. Social
and economic problems are not the only problems which fret the mind
and engage the interest of modern men. But they are proportionately
more important in an advanced than in a primitive society. Modern men
face no problem that is greater than that of their aggregate existence.
How can they live in some kind of decent harmony with their fellow men
when the size and intricacy of their social machinery tends continually
to aggravate the vices which make human life inhuman? How shall they
gain mastery over the instruments by which they have mastered nature
so that these will not become the means of projecting nature’s vices
into human history? How shall they bring the life of great social and
political groups under the dominion of conscience and moral law? These
are the problems upon which hangs the future of civilization. Such
social problems are fundamentally ethical and the intimate relation
between religion and morality bring them inevitably into the province
of religion. Can it help to solve them? Will their solution give
religious idealism new vitality? Is the present social impotence of
religion due to innate defects? Or is it due to specific and historical
limitations which the years may change at least as quickly as they
produced them? To such questions we must address ourselves.




                               CHAPTER II

             NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF PERSONALITY


It would be extravagant to claim that the possibility of making the
resources of religion available for the solution of social problems
of modern civilization is absolutely determining for its future.
Religion would continue to maintain itself in modern society even if it
produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits. The problem of living
together is not the only problem which men face, and civilization is
not the only foe with which personality contends. At least two other
fundamental problems engage the interest of every normal individual,
that of developing the multifarious forces of his personality into some
kind of harmony and unity and that of asserting the dignity and worth
of human personality in defiance of nature’s indifference and contempt.
If religion can render the human spirit a tolerably effective service
in the solution of these two problems, its aid will not be scorned
though it fail him in his social problem. It will not maintain itself
with equal vitality in all strata of society, but it will continue some
kind of existence in all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those
classes in which social problems are least urgent.

Psychiatry and the psychological sciences are encroaching upon one
service to the perplexed spirit of man which was once an almost
exclusive province of religion. They are offering him aid in the task
of integrating the heterogeneous forces, with which ages of human
and prehuman history have endowed him, into the unity of dependable
character; and there are those who think that this service will obviate
his need for religion in this field. Undoubtedly it will be to the
advantage of any moral or religious discipline of the individual
life to avail itself of a more precise knowledge of the intricacies
of human personality; yet only the most mechanistic and naturalistic
ethical theorist would maintain that the knowledge of self is the
only prerequisite of self-mastery, and that the eternal conflict
between the higher will and the immediate desires, about which the
religious of every age have testified, may be composed by nothing more
than a better understanding of the devious ways of human intelligence
and emotion. The psychological sciences have undoubtedly saved men
from some morbid fears and repressions, but the most modern school
of psychological mechanists and determinists seems more anxious to
destroy restraints which are the product of ages of moral experience
than to correct the defects which reveal themselves inevitably on the
fringe of every moral discipline. The reason mechanistic psychiatry and
psycho-analysis run easily into a justification of license is because
they labor under the illusion that the higher self (they would scorn
that term) is able to put all internal forces in their proper place, if
only it knows their previous history and actual direction. Under such
an illusion the clamant desires of man’s physical life are bound to
be closer to the center of character than any moral discipline would
allow. Modern determinism is too naturalistic to see or to be willing
to regard human personality as the incarnation of moral and spiritual
values which did not have their origin in any immediate necessity and
which no individual will maintain if his resolution is not strengthened
by something more than his momentary and obvious experience. This is
not to say that moral discipline in individual life can be maintained
by religion alone. A humanistic ethical idealism, which makes the
experience of the race the guide and inspiration of individual
conduct, will not fail to aid men toward some higher integration of
personality, though it will seldom go beyond the Greek ideal of a
balanced life which knows how to escape sublime enthusiasms as well as
crass excesses. The value of religion in composing the conflict with
which the inner life of man is torn is that it identifies man’s highest
values, about which he would center his life, with realities in the
universe itself, and teaches him how to bring his momentary impulses
under the dominion of his will by subjecting his will to the guidance
of an absolute will. “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be
free,” has ever been the prayer of religious people. “He who loses his
life for my sake shall find it,” said Jesus. In such paradoxes the
truth is revealed that the highest peace comes to men where their life
is centered not in what is best in them but in that beyond them which
is better than their best.

Obviously this function of religion in the life of the individual
has its social implications; but it is not to be assumed that the
integration of personality automatically solves man’s social problem.
That assumption, which religion invariably makes, is one of its very
defects in dealing with the social problem. A unified personality may
still be anti-social in its dominant desires and the very self-respect
which issues from its higher integration may become the screen for its
unsocial attitudes.

Just as important as the problem of bringing peace to the warring
factions within the soul of man is the task of giving human personality
a sense of worth in the face of nature’s indifference and contempt;
and of adjusting man’s highest values to nature’s sublimer moods. The
significance of the religious inclinations of country people lies just
here. The peasant is religious because man’s relation to the natural
world about him is still the agrarian’s great interest. His ethical
life is simple and develops in those primary or family relationships in
which problems are comparatively few and a disturbance of the religious
temper by unethical social facts rather infrequent. He is close enough
to nature to be prompted to awe and reverence by her beauties and
sublimities, to gratitude by her vast and perennial benevolences,
and to fear by her occasional cruel caprices. He expresses his awe
in worship, his gratitude in the spring and harvest festivals, which
are traditional in all religions, and when her momentary atrocities
overtake him he appeals from nature’s God to the God who is above
nature and seeks the intervention of a supernatural ally in behalf of
human personality. In a sense the religion of peasants remains the
constant spring of religious sentiment in every class of society, which
others may corrupt or refine but never quite destroy. Urban men suffer
from an atrophy of the religious sense because they lose, as they are
divorced from the soil, some of the reverence to which a view of the
serene majesties of nature prompts and some of the fear occasioned by
her elemental passions. Yet the most sophisticated and emancipated
city dweller cannot finally escape the problem of the relation of the
human spirit to the natural world in which it is at once child and
rebel. Even the refinements and artificialities of urban life will not
save man from facing nature’s last and most implacable servant—death,
nor free him of the necessity of making some kind of appeal against
the obvious victory which nature claims at the grave. The fight of
personality against nature is religion’s first battle, and that is one
reason why there is always a possibility that other struggles will
be neglected for it. Traditional religion fails in its social tasks
partly because men have suffered longer from the sins of nature than
from the sins of man; and religious forms and traditions are therefore
better adjusted to offer them comfort for these distresses than for
any other from which they suffer. Religion is not yet fully oriented
to the new perils to personality which are developed in civilization.
But it may fail to meet these and yet not be totally discredited; for
the new perils have not supplanted the old ones. At its best religion
is both a sublimation and a qualification of the will to live. Defeated
by nature the human spirit rises above nature through religious faith,
discovering and creating a universe in which divine personality is
the supreme power and human personality a cherished, protected and
deathless reality. But this religious sublimation of the will to live
must be balanced by a qualification of that will to live by which
men are persuaded to sacrifice themselves for each other, that they
may save themselves from each other and realize their highest self.
Love is a natural fruit of religion but not an inevitable one. A high
appreciation of personality ought to issue in a reverence for all
personalities and in a qualification of the tendency to self-assertion
for the sake of other personalities. But left to itself religion easily
becomes a force which sublimates but does not qualify man’s desire for
survival; in which case it may still function in simple societies but
will be less useful in those which are highly complex and in which the
problem of human relationships has become very important.

Next to the faith of agrarian classes the greatest stronghold of
religion is in the life of the middle classes of the city. This
phenomenon is due to several causes. Ideals of self-mastery and
personal rectitude are always strongest in those classes in which
physical resources are not so abundant as to tempt to sensual excesses
and not so scant as to lead to an obsession with life’s externalities.
For that reason the resources of religion for the solution of personal
moral problems are particularly coveted by the middle classes. On the
other hand the middle classes are also religious because they are
comparatively unconscious of their responsibility for society’s sins
and comparatively untouched by the evil consequences of an unethical
civilization. They may therefore indulge in a religion which creates
moral respectability, and reinforces self-respect, even though it does
not force them to share their sense of worth with all their fellows.
There is for this reason an element of hypocrisy in all middle-class
religion of which it never becomes clearly conscious but which helps to
create the corroding cynicism from which the lower classes of modern
society suffer.

Since ideals of personal righteousness flourish in the genteel
poverty of the countryside at least as well as in urban middle class
conditions, the religion of peasants and the city’s middle classes have
two characteristics in common: their preoccupation with problems of
the individual life and their concern for the adjustment of the soul
to nature’s realities. But while they share these elements the two
types of religion are by no means identical. The simple expedient of
claiming divine and supernatural intervention in the soul’s specific
cases of distress does not appeal to the sophisticated intelligence of
city people, particularly since higher learning has become so general
and science has become the burden of this learning. They are anxious to
correct the intellectual inadequacies of traditional religion; and if
they are conscious of any moral defects in it, they have the easy faith
that these will be eliminated with a proper adjustment of religious
affirmations to the world of scientific fact.

The conflict between orthodoxy and liberalism, between fundamentalism
and modernism, is essentially a conflict between city and countryside.
Though the Protestant Reformation was used by the rising cities
to assert the needs of the inner life against a too artificially
elaborated institutional religion and to express an ethic of
individualism against the traditional loyalties of the peasants
rather than to make a readjustment of religion to the growing demands
of intellectual life, the humanistic revival which preceded the
Reformation was clearly determined by this latter interest and it
contributed to the dissolution of the medieval religious structure.
In the recent theological controversies within Protestantism, between
Conservatism and Liberalism, the religious naïvete of the agrarian and
the intellectual sophistication of the city are more obvious influences
in the conflict.

The revision of ancient affirmations of faith in the light of modern
learning was of course necessary from the point of view of the general
needs of the age, and not required merely to satisfy the intellectual
scruples of a particular class in society which has a preponderant
influence in the Protestant church. It might be better to say therefore
that the commercial middle classes appropriated as much as they
prompted the revision of Protestant theology and religion.

By doing this they have indeed created a religion capable of
maintaining itself in urban civilization, but it develops little
power for the ethical reconstruction of industrial society. The same
religionists who pride themselves upon the reasonableness of their
faith generally use their very modern and revised religion to sanctify
a very unmodern and unrevised ethical orthodoxy, an individualistic
orthodoxy which makes much of self-realization and comparatively little
of the social needs of modern life.

The kind of liberal religion which thrives among the privileged
classes of the city gives them some guarantee of the worth of their
personalities against the threats of a seemingly impersonal universe
which science has revealed, but it does not help to make them aware
of the perils to personality in society itself. The final test of any
religion must be its ability to prompt ethical action upon the basis
of reverence for personality. To create a world view which justifies a
high appreciation of personality and fails to develop an ethic which
guarantees the worth of personality in society, is the great hypocrisy.
It is the hypocrisy which is corrupting almost all modern religion.
In a sense hypocrisy is the inevitable by-product of every religion.
Men are never as good as their ideals and never as conscious as the
impartial observer of their divergence from them. Every religious
person commits the error of solipsism in some form or other, the
sin of claiming for himself what he will not grant to his brothers.
The religion of modern men, particularly of the privileged classes,
seems to be more than ordinarily insincere, partly because the social
simplicity of another age obscured this inevitable hypocrisy and partly
because the privilege of the religious classes is so great and its
unethical basis in modern society, particularly from the perspective of
the lowly, so patent and so destructive, that it is no longer possible
to veil the immoral implications of a self-centered religion.

The question which we really face, therefore, is whether religion is
constitutionally but a sublimation of man’s will to live or whether
it can really qualify the will of the individual and restrain his
expansive desires for the sake of society. If it is only the former,
it will continue to be the peculiar possession either of those who
have no urgent social problems or of those who are the beneficiaries
and not the victims of social maladjustments. If religion is not
now functioning in the solution of social and ethical problems, its
impotence in this field may be due to constitutional weaknesses which
may be corrected, once they are understood, or it may be due to certain
specific historical influences of the past centuries of Western life
which further experience will change and qualify. If religion has
resources for the solution of social and ethical problems which have
not been made available for the uses of society, it is the duty of
modern teachers of religion and of all who still have confidence
in its social efficacy or who benefit by its comforts to work for
the elimination of its social limitations, whether they seem to be
incidental and casual or basic and constitutional. Even constitutional
limitations in the social task need not discredit religion as a social
force; for a valuable resource may be closely related to a social
limitation and a way may be discovered to detach the one from the
other. Men always tend to be either uncritical devotees or merciless
critics of the various values which emerge in human life. This is
particularly true in regard to the values of religion, the limitations
of which are always aggravated by its unreflective champions and
made the occasion of sweeping abuse by its critics. Religious people
have assumed too easily that a religious life must issue not only in
private rectitude but in perfect social attitudes. This overestimate
of its social usefulness easily creates a reaction of criticism which
denies that there is any useful counsel in religion for the problems of
society or any dynamic necessary for their solution.




                              CHAPTER III

                    THE SOCIAL RESOURCES OF RELIGION


The task of analyzing and isolating the ethical limitations and the
social deficiencies of religion is to no purpose if there is not in
religion itself, at its best, some resources which civilization and
society need for the solution of their problems. Some critics of
religion discount it entirely as a social force, or at least as a force
of social progress. Bertrand Russell’s prejudices on this subject
are too violent to make his testimony against religion particularly
weighty. Yet he speaks for a large number of ethically sensitive
individuals who share his critical attitude, if not his vehemence,
when he declares: “Since the thirteenth century the church has
consistently encouraged men’s blood lust and avarice and discouraged
every approach to human and kindly feeling.... Emancipation from the
churches is still an essential condition of improvement, particularly
in America where the churches have more influence than in Europe....
Of all requisites for the regeneration of society the decay of religion
seems to me to have the best chance of being realized.”[2] The number
of people among the middle and higher classes who would subscribe to
such a denunciation of organized religion is probably not very large.
But there are very many who ignore the church as a force for social
amelioration; and in the class of industrial workers a temper against
the church exceeding even Mr. Russell’s violence is very general.

Whatever may be the facts in regard to contemporary religion and to
other specific types of organized religious life, it is relevant to ask
whether religion as such, freed from its specific limitations, contains
indispensable resources for the ethical reconstruction of society.

The first resource which would seem to be of social value is the social
imagination which religion, at its best, develops upon the basis of
its high evaluation of personality. A spiritual interpretation of the
universe may not issue automatically in a high appreciation of human
personality, but religion is never quite able to deny this ethical
implication of its faith, and in occasional moments of high insight
it revels in it. It persuades men to regard their fellows as their
brothers because they are all children of God. It insists, in other
words, that temporal circumstance and obvious differences are dwarfed
before the spiritual affinities which men have through their common
relation to a divine creator. Thus Jesus could deal sympathetically
with the harlot of the street, the publican at the gate, the Samaritan
woman at the well and the blinded fanatics and their dupes who
crucified him. The apostle Paul, though he did not always understand
the genius of his master, was nevertheless able to apprehend this
central dogma at the heart of religion and declare: “In Christ there
is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free.” Celsus, the critic
of the Christian church in the first century, derides the church for
its failure to distinguish between outcasts and respectable citizens.
The fervor and consistency with which the church has espoused the ideal
of the equal worth of all personalities has not always equaled that
of the early church; many compromises with the brute facts of history
have been made; yet the church has never been able to betray this faith
altogether. The missionary enterprise with all its weaknesses is still
a revelation of this power in religion. Oceans are bridged and varying
circumstances of race and environment are ignored in order that the
soul inspired by God may claim kinship with other souls of every race
and every clime.

The physical characteristics and outward circumstances in which men
differ are sometimes not so great as they seem to the superficial
observer; wherefore education may do as much as religion to cultivate
and discover those profounder unities which made all men brothers.
There are hatreds which are due merely to misunderstanding. They
spring from the parochialism of the average mind, which knows no
better than to regard with contempt what differs from the standards
and values to which it has become habituated. Education and culture
may emancipate men from such hatreds. Other misunderstandings which
are caused by a superficial analysis of men’s action may be dissipated
by a profounder appreciation of the complex life of every individual
out of which each action emerges. Yet understanding alone does not
solve all the problems of living together. We do not hate only those
whom we do not know or understand. Sometimes we hate those most whom
we know best. Love does not flow inevitably out of intimacy. Intimacy
may merely accentuate previous attitudes, whether they be benevolent or
malevolent. Anthropologists are easily obsessed with the inequalities
which men reveal in their natural state, and the very abundance of
their knowledge prompts them to an ethically enervating determinism
when they attempt to gauge the potentialities of so-called primitive
peoples. The modern psychologists are more inclined to accept the
dogma of the total depravity of man than the ancient theologians were,
and they prove thereby that a profound knowledge of human nature need
not incline men to regard human beings with reverence and affection.
Mr. H. L. Mencken may not speak for the scientists, but he is somewhat
typical of the cynicism which follows in the wake of intellectualism.
His estimate of human beings is: “Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride
on a gigantic flywheel.... He is lazy, improvident, unclean.... Life
is a combat between jackals and jackasses.” Love is always slightly
irrational and requires an irrational urge for its support. It is at
least as irrational as hatred and the same intelligence which mitigates
the one may enervate the other. A highly sophisticated intelligence is
generally unable to survey the human scene with any higher attitude
than that of pity for human beings, and pity is a form of contempt
under a thin disguise of sympathy.

The facts of human nature are sufficiently complex to validate
almost any hypothesis which may be projected into them. Therefore
the assumptions upon which we essay our social contacts are all
important. One reason why the social sciences can never attain the
scientific prestige of the physical sciences to which they aspire is
that the importance of hypotheses increases with the complexity and
variability of the data into which they are projected. Every assumption
is an hypothesis, and human nature is so complex that it justifies
almost every assumption and prejudice with which either a scientific
investigation or an ordinary human contact is initiated. A vital
religion not only prompts men to venture the assumption that human
beings are essentially trustworthy and lovable, but it endows them with
the courage and inclination to maintain their hypothesis when immediate
facts contradict it until fuller facts are brought in to verify it.
Mere sentiment is easily defeated by life’s disappointing realities.
Anatole France observed that if one started with the supposition that
men are naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to
kill them all. Human nature is neither lovable nor trustworthy in its
undisciplined state and a sentimental overestimate of its virtue may
well result in the reaction to which Anatole France alludes. Yet its
undeveloped resources are always greater than either a superficial or
critical intelligence is able to fathom. There must be an element of
faith in love if it is to be creative. “Love,” said Paul, “believes all
things”; and it may be added that it saves its faith from absurdity
by creating some of the evidence which justifies its assumptions. It
“hopes till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Nothing less than a religious appreciation of personality, supported
by a spiritual interpretation of the universe itself in terms of
moral goodwill, will make love robust enough to overcome momentary
disappointments and gain its final victory. The injunction of Jesus
to his disciples to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven,
represents the natural social strategy of a robust and vital religious
idealism, which subdues evil by its unswerving confidence in the good.

While it is true that religion does not issue automatically in an
attitude of reverence and goodwill toward all human personalities, it
nevertheless remains a fact that a religious world view does incline
men to regard their fellow men from a perspective which obscures
differences and imperfections and reveals affinities and potential
virtue. Even if intelligence became imaginative enough to discover
the affinities, it could not be courageous enough to challenge the
evil in men in the name of their better selves. The art of forgiveness
can be learned only in the school of religion. And it is an art
which men must learn increasingly as a complex society makes human
associations more and more intimate. Whatever improvement a growing
social science may establish in the technique of social intercourse,
men will never escape the necessity of overcoming the evil, which they
inflict upon each other, by creative patience and courageous trust. A
higher intelligence may mitigate our fears and an exacter justice may
restrain the inclination to wreak vengeance upon the wrongdoer; but
only the stubborn forces of religion will turn fear into trust and
hatred into love. Sometimes mutual fear and hatred reduce themselves to
such an absurdity (as in the late World War) that even a superficial
intelligence can recognize it; but their absurdity does not become
patent until they have issued in mutual annihilation. Even then the
person with an ordinary commonsense view of life can do no better than
to substitute partial trust for fear and partial understanding for
hatred. So one war breeds the next. All men are potentially at once our
foes and our friends. An unreflective social life assumes that they
are enemies and helps to make them so. A higher social intelligence
establishes a nicely balanced compromise between trust and mistrust so
that the one cannot be very creative and the other not too destructive.
Only the foolishness of faith knows how to assume the brotherhood of
man and to create it by the help of the assumption. A religious ideal
is always a little absurd because it insists on the truth of what
ought to be true but is only partly true; it is however the ultimate
wisdom, because reality slowly approaches the ideals which are implicit
in its life. A merely realistic analysis of any given set of facts is
therefore as dangerous as it is helpful. The creative and redemptive
force is a faith which defies the real in the name of the ideal, and
subdues it.

Love is, in short, a religious attitude. There are circumstances in
which it may prosper without the inspiration of religion. In the family
relation and in other intimate circles proximity and consanguinity
may prompt men to regard human beings as essentially good, and direct
experience validate their faith. That is why Jesus discounted love in
the family as a religious achievement. “If ye love those who love you,
what thanks have ye?” In the secondary relations, which are no longer
secondary in the matter of importance to human welfare, the matter
is not so simple. In these only a sublime assumption will persuade
men to embark upon the adventure of brotherhood, and only a robust
and constantly replenished faith will inure them against inevitable
disappointments. The religious interpretation of the world is
essentially an insistence that the ideal is real and that the real can
be understood only in the light of the ideal. Since the family relation
is the most ethical relation men know, religious faith interprets all
life in terms of that relation. In view of many of the facts of history
which seem to reveal the world of man as but a projection of the world
of nature in which animal fights with animal and herd with herd, this
kind of interpretation is superficially too absurd to persuade a highly
sophisticated intelligence. It is the truth which is withheld from the
wise and revealed to babes. Yet it is the truth without which men will
not be able to build a peaceful society. It is the truth which even the
physical facts of a highly complex civilization, in which space and
time are being annihilated, are conspiring to make true. The races and
groups of mankind are obviously not living as a family; but they ought
to. And as the necessity becomes more urgent the truth of the ideal
becomes more real.

It would be foolish to insist that goodwill alone will create
conscience and that to detect the ethical core at the heart of man’s
being is all that is required to make him ethical. It is a task to
persuade human beings to trust their fellows; but is equally important
to prompt their fellows to trustworthy action. If human nature is left
unchallenged and undeveloped, it hardly qualifies the brute struggle
for survival sufficiently to validate any religion or ethic of trust.
Men’s actions are not as free as we have imagined. The social, economic
and psychological sciences have restricted the concept of freedom in
the soul of man as the physical sciences have restricted it in the
universe. Man is not only less free than he had once imagined, but he
is not as free as he once was. If science has discredited the idea of
freedom, civilization has circumscribed the fact. It is easier for man
to act as an ethical individual in a comparatively simple social group,
such as the family, than in a very large and complex social group when
even the most robust ethical purpose must meet the resistance and
the corruption of the primitive and untamed desires of the group. If
man is capable of sacrificing immediate advantages for ultimate ones
and his own advantages for the sake of society, this capacity is an
achievement which he gains only after much effort and preserves from
corruption only at the price of eternal vigilance. The first requisite
of an ethical life in modern civilization is a realization of the
difficulties which face the human conscience in maintaining itself
against the pressure of immediate desires to which the whole emotional
life of man is wedded. It is not easy to sacrifice meat for beauty,
pleasure for some seemingly ephemeral value, self-interest for the sake
of the family, the interest of the family for the sake of society, the
interest of our generation for the society of to-morrow. Yet only by
such sacrifices can man prove the reality and potency of his creative
will. If such sacrifices are not actually made, all so-called morality
becomes in fact a device for obscuring the bestiality of man without
overcoming it.

The fact that, in spite of the pressure of the struggle for survival,
man has created a kingdom of values in which truth, beauty and goodness
have been made real, is proof that he is more free and more moral than
the modern cynic is willing to concede. But his kingdom of values is
never as uncorrupted as he imagines. The task therefore of binding
men to spiritual values, and of prompting them to sacrifice immediate
pleasures and physical satisfactions for them, is difficult almost to
the point of desperation. Religion makes its contribution to it by
giving man the assurance that the world of values really has a relevant
place in the universe and that values are permanent and will be
conserved. He is challenged to sacrifice in a universe in which love is
a basic law. He is asked to prefer personal values to property values
in a world in which personality is the highest reality. He is prompted
to exercise his conscience under the scrutiny and with the sympathy of
a higher conscience. Religion in its purest form does not guarantee
man an immediate reward for every ethical achievement; indeed it may
offer him no reward at all except the reward which inheres in the act
itself. But it does give him the final satisfaction of guaranteeing
the reality of a universe which is not blind to the values for which
he must pay such a high price, and which is not indifferent or hostile
to his struggle. It asks him to respect human personality because the
universe itself, in spite of some obvious evidence to the contrary,
knows how to conserve personality; and to create values in a world in
which values are not an effervescence but a reality. Religion is in
short the courageous logic which makes the ethical struggle consistent
with world facts. In its most vital form religion validates its sublime
assumptions in immediate experience and gives man an unshakable
certainty. It thus becomes the dynamic of moral action as well as the
logic which makes the action reasonable.

The force of its faith operates not only to preserve moral vigor but to
sensitize moral judgments. The God of religious devotion is not only
revealed in the moral values of the universe outside of man, but he is
revealed in the aspirations of man which are beyond his achievements.
God insures not only the preservation of values but their perfection.
All moral achievement is qualified by the relativities of time and
circumstance. The worship of a holy God saves the soul from taking
premature satisfaction in its partial achievement. It subjects every
moral value to comparison with a more perfect moral ideal. Of course
the absolute perfection of God is itself conditioned by the imperfect
human insight which conceives it. A cruel age may picture God more
cruel than itself, and to a generation lusting for power God may be
the supreme tyrant. Thus religion may become the sanctification of
human imperfections. Yet in its highest form religion does inculcate
a wholesome spirit of humility which gives the soul no peace in any
virtue while higher virtue is attainable.

The force of religion in moral action and the necessity of religious
assurance for the highest type of social life may be gauged by
an analysis of possible alternatives to a social life which is
oriented by a religious world view. There are two real alternatives
to such a life. The one is based upon an ethical but unreligious
world view, and the other scorns both ethics and religion in its
absolute determinism. An ethical life which claims no support from
religion may on occasion develop a very high type of social idealism,
particularly since it escapes the ethical defects of religion even
while it sacrifices religious resources. Stoicism is in many respects
superior to pantheistic religions; for there are moral advantages in
underestimating rather than overestimating the virtue of the universe.
It is better to create a sense of tension between the conscience of
man and a morally indifferent nature than to obscure the moral defects
of nature by a deification of the natural order. But if men disavow
all faith in a power not their own which makes for righteousness,
they cannot finally save themselves from either arrogance or despair.
Religion may destroy man’s self-reliance by an undue sense of humility,
but even that limitation is no more destructive of moral values
than a self-reliance which prompts the human spirit to strut for a
while on this narrow world in the consciousness of unique virtue
before capitulating to a world which is too blind to know what it has
destroyed. Thomas Huxley thought he would as soon worship “a wilderness
of monkeys” as to give himself to the worship of humanity after the
fashion of Comte. To insist too strenuously upon the uniqueness of
human life in the cosmic order must inevitably issue in the pride
which such a worship implies. Since the Renaissance there has been a
marked decay of the spirit of humility in Western civilization which
is closely associated with the secularization of its ethical idealism.
The difference between the pride of secular idealism and the humility
implicit in genuine religion may be gauged, as Professor Irving Babbitt
suggests, by comparing Confucius with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius with
Jesus. Pascal thought the stoics were guilty of “diabolical pride.” The
judgment may be too severe, but it must be confessed that a purely
secular idealism has difficulty in escaping a morally destructive
arrogance from which true religion is saved because it subjects all
values and achievements to measurement, with its absolutes as the
criteria. “Why callest thou me good?” said Jesus: “no one is good save
God.” In the religion of Jesus the perfection of God is consistently
defined as an absolute love by comparison with which all altruistic
achievements fall short. “I say unto you, love your enemies; bless
them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and
persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father in heaven; for he
maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain upon
the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what
reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?... Be ye therefore
perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”[3] Here the value
of an absolute standard to save from undue pride in partial ethical
achievements is particularly apparent. Prudential morality can hardly
go beyond the encouragement of altruism within the social group, i.e.
loving those “which love you.” That is precisely what Stoicism did.
It is just this pride in partial achievement which complicates the
moral problem of modern life; for our ethical difficulties are created
by the very tendency of reasonable ethics to make life within groups
moral and never to aspire to the moral redemption of inter-group
relations. Humility is therefore a spiritual grace which has value
not only for its own sake but for its influence upon social problems.
Traditional religions, which live off of original inspirations and
experiences without recreating them, easily fall into a pride of their
own, the pride which comes from identifying the absolute standards of
their inspired source with their partial achievements and inevitable
compromises. But religion in its purest and most unspoiled form is
always productive of a spirit of humility which regards every moral
achievement as but a vantage point from which new ventures of faith and
life are to be initiated toward the alluring perfection which is in God.

An ethical idealism unsupported by religion is almost as certain to
issue in final despair as in unjustified pride. A few choice spirits
are sometimes able to imagine themselves in rebellion against the
universe without finally succumbing to a temper of sullenness; but the
dreadful logic of insisting upon conscience in a conscienceless world
inevitably leaves its mark upon the multitude. Oswald Spengler, in his
morphology of civilizations,[4] presents “religion without God” as the
unvarying symptom of a dying civilization, too sophisticated to believe
in the cosmic worth of its moral values but not quite ready to abandon
them. The enervating effect of a moral idealism which has sacrificed
its hopes with its illusions always becomes apparent in the long run,
but frequently it reveals itself quite immediately in the very lives of
its most robust champions.

Mr. Russell may think that the “firm foundation of unyielding despair”
is an adequate basis for an ethical life, but his own growing
bitterness betrays how such a philosophy corrupts moral idealism
with a sense of frustration. The idealist is put into the position of
sacrificing everything for values which have no guaranteed reality
in the cosmic order. Even his faith in mankind is finally destroyed;
for however precious personal values may seem in a given moment, his
philosophy denies him the right to attribute any lasting worth to them.
True religion gives man a sense of both humility and security before
the holiness which is at once the source and the goal of his virtue;
and thus it saves him at the same time from premature complacency and
ultimate despair. The choice between irreligious and religious idealism
is the choice between pride which issues in despondency and humility
which becomes the basis of self-respect. There is an irrational element
in either alternative; but the irreligious idealist is in error when he
imagines that he has chosen the more reasonable alternative; his choice
is no more reasonable and morally much less potent.

The absolute determinists who have as little confidence in the moral
integrity of human nature as in any moral meaning in cosmic facts
are more consistent than the Stoics, but they are involved in worse
absurdities. Their cynicism robs them of both an adequate motive and an
adequate method for social reconstruction. Discounting moral idealism
even while they exhibit it in their social passion, they ostensibly
desire social reconstruction only in the interest of the class to which
they belong. But their personal interests are not frequently identical
with those of the oppressed classes and they are moved as much by
sympathy for the plight of the victims of our present society as by any
selfish considerations. They profess to be prompted by the reflection
that individual action has become useless in a capitalistic age and
that it is possible to advance the interests of an individual only by
making common cause with other individuals in a similar predicament.
Meanwhile there is hardly an economic determinist, even among those
who are actually members of the class of the oppressed, who could not
gain higher advantages for himself by disassociating himself from his
class than by making common cause with it. This is certainly true of
those who are intelligent enough to evolve or elaborate the theory of
absolute determinism.

Absolute determinism, when developed consistently, must disavow all
other methods of social reconstruction but that of ruthless conflict.
If nothing qualifies the self-interest of men, a conflict of interests
becomes inevitable. This defect in method is even more important than
the defect in its motive. A ruthless struggle can result in an ordered
society only if the victors are able to annihilate their foes. But even
in that event the interests of the members of any class engaged in a
social or political struggle will cease to be identical as soon as its
foes are eliminated. Thus a new and equally ruthless struggle must
result between the comparatively strong and comparatively weak, the
comparatively privileged and the comparatively underprivileged victors.
Ultimately men cannot escape the necessity of building a stable society
by the mutual compromise and the mutual sacrifice of conflicting
rights. The determinists have made an important contribution to the
modern social problem by revealing the brutal nature of much of man’s
social life. Even if the human conscience could be sensitized to a
much greater degree than now seems probable, it will not be possible
to eliminate conflict between various social and economic groups.[5]
Good men do not easily realize how selfish they are if someone does
not resist their selfishness; and they are not inclined to abridge
their power if someone does not challenge their right to hold it.
Religious and moral idealism cannot be expected to eliminate, but it
can be expected to mitigate social warfare. The conscience of man
must finally be the force which builds a new society; and a man with
a conscience must be the end for which such a society is built. If
there is no virtue in man which lifts him above the brute struggle for
survival, there is no value in him to justify the effort of building
a new and more perfect society—and he is not the stuff out of which
such a society can be built. It is difficult to escape the conclusion
that the reverence for personality which is implicit in religion is
necessary to establish an adequate motive and an adequate method
of social reconstruction. Reverence for personality qualifies the
individual’s will to power so that his life can be integrated with
other lives with a minimum of conflict; and it saves society from
sacrificing the individual to the needs of the group. In the religion
of Jesus both a social and an individualistic emphasis issues from a
spiritual appreciation of human personality. The individual is given a
place and prestige which he never before possessed in society. Western
civilization owes much to the high evaluation of the individual which
Jesus introduced into the thought of the world. On the other hand this
emphasis is saved from mere individualism by an ethic which helps
the individual to realize his highest self by sacrificing personal
advantages for social values.

The contribution of religion to the task of an ethical reconstruction
of society is its reverence for human personality and its aid in
creating the type of personality which deserves reverence. Men cannot
create a society if they do not believe in each other. They cannot
believe in each other if they cannot see the potential in the real
facts of human nature. And they cannot have the faith which discovers
potentialities if they cannot interpret human nature in the light of a
universe which is perfecting and not destroying personal values.




                               CHAPTER IV

               THE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM OF MODERN RELIGION


The charge against religion most frequently made by critics who are
interested in social reconstruction is that it is a conservative
force which impedes social progress. If it has resources which are
indispensable for the life of society, social idealists will not
appreciate them if its contemporary forms are invariably aligned
with the social forces most intent upon preserving the status quo.
Contemporary liberal Christianity refutes the charge of social
conservatism by appealing to the social radicalism of Jesus which it
alleges to have appropriated. By this appeal liberal Christianity
exhibits one of the very tendencies of religion which subjects it
to the criticism of social liberals. Religion is easily tempted to
make devotion to the ideal a substitute for its realization and to
become oblivious to the inevitable compromise between its ideal and
the brute facts of life. The absolute nature of the ethics of Jesus
and the perfect harmony between his religion and his ethics may be
the guarantee of the perennial spiritual and ethical renewal of the
Christian religion; but it is also occasion for the self-deception of
many professed disciples. Many streams of thought have contributed to
the current of modern liberal Christianity and it contains alluvial
deposits from all Western civilizations. Yet it imagines that it
represents a simple return to radical and dynamic ethics of the
religion of Jesus. By this deception it easily becomes the façade
behind which the brutal facts of modern industrial civilization may be
obscured rather than a force by which they might be eliminated. The
Protestant Reformation suffered from the same deception. It thought of
itself as a return to the original ideal when it was, as a matter of
fact, a new type of compromise.

Catholicism was a compound of early Christianity and the thought and
life of Græco-Roman civilization. The medieval church was a kind of
ghostly aftermath of the Roman empire and the popes were inspired by
the genius of Cæsar as much as by the spirit of Christ. The north
European peoples first accepted this latinized Christianity, partly
because they were attracted by those universal elements in it which
have made their appeal to all peoples, and particularly those of
the Western world, and partly because it was for them the symbol
of the ordered civilization of Rome which they first envied, then
destroyed, and finally tried to rebuild. In time they reacted against
the ecclesiastical, international and feudal solidarities of this
whole politico-religious world, prompted no doubt by the untamed
spirit of liberty which characterized the northern peoples and which
resented the tyranny by which the middle ages achieved their high
measure of social cohesion. Thus Protestantism became the handmaiden
of a budding nationalism which was impatient of the restraints of
an international papacy, as it has since been impatient of every
other type of international control. In time it also came to be the
peculiar spiritual possession of those classes among the northern
peoples who developed modern commerce and industry. The affinity
between its sanctification of the principle of liberty and the
necessary individualism of classes which were intent upon destroying
the traditional restraints of the ancient world for the sake of giving
unhampered play to a growing commercial and industrial life, has been
so perfect that it is hardly possible to decide which of the two is
cause and which effect. Max Weber[6] has made an interesting analysis
of commercial and industrial superiority of Protestant nations. It
may be that the aptitude for commercial and industrial pursuits and
an inclination to the Protestant form of the Christian faith are
concomitant characteristics of north European peoples rather than
casually related phenomena. Yet they have become so intimately related
in history that the most typical commercial classes and nations are
most generally Protestant, and most uniquely Protestant. In England
the nonconformist sects are almost identical with the commercial
middle classes, while the established church with its semi-Catholic
genius has spiritual affinities both with the old Tories and the
new world of the industrial worker. In Germany there is a similar
alignment with Catholic and agrarian Bavaria on the one hand and
the highly industrialized and Protestant Prussia on the other. The
contrast between Protestant and industrial Ulster and Catholic and
agrarian south Ireland is equally significant. Everywhere in Western
civilization, and nowhere more than in America, Protestantism with its
individualism became a kind of spiritual sanctification of the peculiar
interests and prejudices of the races and classes which dominate the
industrial and commercial expansion of Western civilization.

Since liberal Christianity is the product of an adjustment of the main
tenets of orthodox Protestantism to the sophistication of the cities
and the growing intelligence of the privileged and therefore educated
classes, its whole moral atmosphere is much more determined by the
special interests of these classes than it is willing to admit. The
authority of Jesus, to which it appeals, has indeed been given a new
emphasis, but this has been done because liberal Christianity valued
the theological simplicity rather than the moral austerity of his
gospel. In the same way many liberal Jews have appealed from the law
to the prophets, not because they had a great passion for the ethical
rigors of an Amos or Isaiah but because they found obedience to the
minute exactions of the law too onerous in a sophisticated age. Jesus
is valuable to the modern Christian because he offers an escape from
the theological absurdities of the ancient creeds; meanwhile his
ethical and religious idealism will not leave the lives of those who
profess to follow him unaffected. In time it may become the instrument
of the regeneration of Western society; but this will not be possible
if the liberal church does not overcome its self-deception and realizes
that its religious and moral life is a composite into which have
entered the imperialism of Rome, the sophistication of the Greeks, the
fierce tribalism and individualism of the Nordics and the prudential
ethics of an industrial civilization.

Religion can be healthy and vital only if a certain tension is
maintained between it and the civilization in which it functions. In
time this tension is inevitably resolved into some kind of compromise.
The tendency of religion to become a conservative social force is
partly derived from its ambition to defend the resultant compromise in
the name of its original ideal. Thus all partial values, determined
by geographic, economic, social and political forces, are given a
pseudo-absolute character by the religious elements which entered
into the compromise; and their defects are sufficiently obscured and
sanctified to make them comparatively impregnable to the attacks
of the critics of the status quo. The Russian moujik was more than
ordinarily docile under the tyranny of the czars and more than
ordinarily patient with the imperfections of his society, because his
obedience was claimed not by Russia but by “holy Russia,” the historic
incarnation of his religion. In the same way the medieval church
became organically involved with feudalism and forced the critics of
feudal society to undermine its influence before they could hope to
change the feudal social order. Orthodox Protestantism is intimately
related to this day with Nordicism, with the racial arrogance of north
European peoples. The Ku Klux Klan, which thrives in the hinterlands
of America, maintains its influence over simple minds by screening
racial prejudice against Slavic, Latin and Semitic peoples behind
a devotion to the spiritual treasures of Protestantism and their
defense against the fancied peril of allegedly inferior religions. In
Ireland the racial pride of Ulstermen expresses itself in a passionate
espousal of the Presbyterian religion and a contemptuous attitude
toward the Catholicism of the Irish. In modern prewar Germany there
was a curious partnership between “Thron und Altar,” the interests
of the nationalist German state, as integrated by the Prussian royal
house, with the interests of Protestantism. To this day the fanatic
monarchists of Germany are also Protestant extremists who imagine that
the monarchy was undermined by religiously motivated conspiracies of
Jews and Catholics. Incidentally the Lutheran type of Protestantism
which flourishes in Germany has always been less intimately aligned
with the commercial classes than the Calvinistic sects of other Western
nations. While the German socialists include the Lutheran church among
the forces of reaction with which they must contend, the church’s real
strength is among the peasants and junkers, who are also the strongest
support of monarchist opinion and who abhor the democratic liberalism
of commercial and industrial Germany as much as they despise socialist
radicalism; and they imagine both to be inspired by Semitic designs
upon their national integrity. The real inspiration of this liberalism
with its emphasis on international conciliation and coöperation is
born out of the economic and political necessities of an industrial
and commercial state which cannot afford to indulge in the fanatic
nationalism to which peasants and agrarian aristocrats are prone.

Liberal Christianity as it has developed in the urban centers of the
Western world grew out of the intellectual and religious needs of
the privileged classes and bears the marks of its social environment
just as much as the other types of religion which have preceded it
and with which it is historically related. It is in the same danger
of becoming a spiritual sublimation of the peculiar interests and
prejudices of these classes while it imagines itself the bearer
of an unconditioned message to its day. It has preserved the same
individualistic ethics which has characterized orthodox Protestantism
and which is so dear to the hearts of the commercial classes, and so
unequal to the moral problems of a complex civilization in which the
needs of interdependence outweigh the values of personal liberty. The
supposed devotion of the privileged classes to a religion in which the
sacrifice rather than the stubborn preservation of individual rights is
enjoined and in which the prudential and utilitarian root of morality
is completely plucked out is one of the incongruities which frequently
occur when a civilization harks back to the spiritual visions of its
childhood in order to obscure the sober and disenchanted practicality
of its maturity.

If the modern church is really to become an instrument of social
redemption, it must learn how to divorce itself from the moral
temper of its age even while it tries to accommodate itself to the
intellectual needs of the generation. The religion of Jesus is free
of theological absurdities. Its very simplicity saves it from undue
entanglements with discredited cosmologies. But those who espouse it
chiefly for this reason easily miss its real genius. Its essential
assumptions may not outrage the mind, but neither are they readily
accepted by an age which has sanctified cool and careful, moral
prudence. Its solemn injunction, “Take no thought for your life,
what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink ... but seek ye first the
kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you,” is strangely anachronistic in a day which worships
obvious and tangible success and appreciates virtue only as it
insures those advantages of health and prosperity which are its
highest desiderata. Prudential morality has its own uses. Few men have
either the imagination or the courage to pursue an ideal if it does
not justify itself by some fairly immediate advantage. Society is not
altogether the loser if men discover that “Godliness is profitable
unto all things,” and espouse an ideal because they have their eye
upon the concrete and obvious advantages which flow from it. But a
prudential morality has its limitations and these will prove less
detrimental to society if they are not sanctified by religion. It is
better therefore to seek no other basis for utilitarian ethics than the
social experience from which it is really derived. Honesty will prove
itself the best policy without the authority of religion. The function
of religion is to nerve men for an ethical achievement when it promises
no immediate returns. From the perspective of an impartial observer
there is an element of hypocrisy in all prudential morality. The cool
intelligence which computes selfish advantage which may flow from
moral action is not imaginative enough to include all persons who are
affected by an action and not dynamic enough to balance the drive of
self-interest which influences it.

In modern industrial society those who are in position of power and
privilege are most inclined to espouse an ethical ideal because it
tends to stabilize social life and thus insures the perpetuation of
privilege. They are also most easily tempted to restrict ethical action
so that it will prompt to no sacrifices which are not consistent with
a wise self-interest. Since they are also the classes which have, for
reasons previously discussed, maintained their loyalty to religion,
the church can avoid connivance with their prudential morality only by
a continual regeneration of its religious life. Failing to maintain
a distinction between utilitarian ethics and a religiously inspired
moral life, the church cannot escape the fate of becoming a useful
adjunct of the forces of privilege in the social and economic conflict
in which modern society is engaged. It may be good business to pay
high wages, but social good may demand an increase in the wages of
workers beyond the point where economic advantage is derived from an
enlightened wage policy. It may be wise to share some privileges so
that all of them will not be lost, but sensitive ethical insight will
detect the selfishness and insincerity in such a course. A religion
which sanctifies such social prudence is ultimately a hindrance to the
ethical reconstruction of modern society. A religion which discovers
and amends the limitations of prudential morality by the elements of
its reverence for personality and its quest for the absolute is a
necessary factor in social reconstruction.

The question which faces the modern church is whether it will help
to hide or to discover the limitations in the ethical orientation of
modern life. Its devotion to the gospel of Jesus may serve either
purpose. The contempt for ethical opportunism implied in the whole
idealism of Jesus and its scorn for immediate advantages are the
very ethical values which the generation needs, but they are also
the values which have given the Christian religion its great moral
authority and prestige which the church can so easily misuse. If the
authority of Jesus prompts men to a courage and imagination which
escapes the defects of contemporary morality, its influence will be
redemptive; if it is used merely to hide the defects, the critics of
the church will be justified in regarding it as detriment to social
progress. The religion which is socially most useful is one which
can maintain a stubborn indifference to immediate ends and thus give
the ethical life of man that touch of the absolute without which all
morality is finally reduced to a decorous but essentially unqualified
self-assertiveness. The paradox of religion is that it serves the world
best when it maintains its high disdain for the world’s values. Its
social usefulness is dependent upon its ability to maintain devotion
to absolute moral and spiritual values without too much concern for
their practical, even for their social usefulness. The church is in a
very favorable position to make a necessary contribution to social
life, for it reveres as Lord one whose life incarnates the strategy
which saves morality from insincerity. But its assets easily became
moral liabilities when it compounds the pure idealism of Jesus with the
calculated practicalities of the age and attempts to give the resultant
compromise the prestige of absolute authority.




                               CHAPTER V

               RELIGION AND LIFE: CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE


It is obvious that the ethical potency of religion depends largely
upon its ability to make its ideals effective in the world and yet
preserve a measure of detachment from those natural forces which
express themselves in human society and offer such stubborn resistance
to every spiritual and ethical ideal that no victory has yet been
gained over them in which the heel of the victor has not been
bruised. Ideal religion makes reverence for personality the end of
human action. Society has its various secular ends the attainment of
which necessitates the debasement of personality. Religion seeks to
persuade men to sacrifice immediate advantages for ultimate values;
the average man whose influence is dominant in all large social groups
is not easily persuaded to forego immediate and concrete advantages
for values which are too remote and too ephemeral to captivate his
imagination. There must therefore be a tension between the spiritual
ideal and all historic societies. The significance of Jesus for the
religious life of the Western world is due to his attainment and
incarnation of a spiritual and moral ideal of such absolute and
transcendent nature that none of his followers have been able to
compromise it by their practical adjustments to the social necessities
of their day. There is therefore a resource in the avowed loyalty of
Western civilization to his ideal which may yet become the basis of its
redemption. It is the peculiar characteristic of men and societies, and
an evidence of both their moral and immoral nature, that they reserve
their most unqualified devotion for those ideals and personalities
which they find difficult to realize or emulate. They pay tribute to
the ideal even while they are corrupting it and they reward those
who have accommodated it to their indifferent capacities with a more
qualified respect.

It was probably inevitable that the church should adjust the spiritual
ideal, which to propagate it ostensibly regards as its very raison
d’être, to the practical needs of the various ages and social orders
with which it came in contact. But it is necessary that it should be
shrewd enough to see the compromise involved in every adjustment and
be stubborn enough to make a new bid for victory after every partial
defeat. On the whole the Catholic church, which Protestants easily
assume to have been more amenable to the practical demands of an
unregenerate society than the churches of the Reformation, has really
been much shrewder than these in gauging the hazards to virtue in the
most natural social relationships. Some of the moral weaknesses in the
modern church may be traced directly to the naïvete of Protestantism in
dealing with the vagaries of human nature, and in failing to estimate
the overt and covert peril to its values in the ordinary ways of men.

Medieval Catholicism had various strategies in preserving and relaxing
the tension between the ideal of religion and the practical needs of
men and society. It made fewest demands upon the individual. He was
permitted to indulge almost all the natural appetites and ambitions
which characterize the life of the average man. For him the religion of
the church was a magic which guaranteed divine intervention in critical
moments and which offered a rather easy short-cut to the prizes of the
spirit which ought to be won only by virtuous achievement. Yet this
same church had an uncompromising attitude toward the various social
institutions which Protestantism has never equaled. It insisted on the
sacramental nature of the family union with such intransigeance that
it may fairly be accused of failing to make necessary accommodations
of its spiritual ideal to the imperfections of human nature. It dealt
with economic relations with less severity but enforced ethical ideals
upon them which must seem unusually exacting to an age which has become
accustomed to the connivance of Protestantism with laissez-faire
economics. The master of the medieval church, Thomas Aquinas, had
elaborated a theory of the just price for all commercial transactions,
which the church made every effort to apply and which it enforced
through the canonical law. The church did not organize the guilds but
it blessed them; and their efforts to regulate wages, fix fair profits,
insure high quality of merchandise and organize mutual aid among
their members were prompted by a religiously inspired moral idealism.
While it dealt less successfully with the ethical implications of the
relations between landowners and peasants, it impressed the owners
with a sense of their obligation toward those who were economically
dependent upon them which to this day gives the landed aristocracy
of European nations a certain moral superiority over the industrial
overlords who have been trained in more modern schools of thought. The
ambition of the medieval church to dominate the life of the nations
is well known but frequently misinterpreted. The contest between the
papacy and the empire was indeed in some of its aspects no more than
a conflict between two great political organizations lusting for the
power which easily becomes the sole end of the life of social and
political organisms. Yet there was a measure of ethical idealism in
the political aspirations of the popes to which Protestant thought
has given scant justice. In the two greatest exponents of the papacy
as an international political force, Gregory VII and Innocence III,
particularly in Gregory, the ethical ideal of a unified Christian
society which knows how to hold the capricious self-will of nations in
check and how to set bounds to their natural lust for power is of no
small moment in the development of papal policy. The very autocracy of
the papacy, which the modern world finds so little to its liking, was
elaborated by Gregory in order to save the church from international
anarchy and make it an instrument of international unification.
Incidentally Gregory was neither the first nor the last great statesman
who preferred autocracy to anarchy, and the preference is supported by
more than one lesson of history. Free coöperation between individuals
and groups is a high and rare political and moral achievement, and
where men’s capacities are unequal to it there are occasions when it
may be better to sacrifice freedom than to destroy social cohesion. At
any rate the medieval church revealed both political shrewdness and
spiritual idealism in its attempt to dominate the life of nations.
Naturally its efforts did not result in any ideal society. The ambition
of the Cæsar haunted the life of the popes and in many respects the
work of their hands approximated the dominion of an Augustus more
nearly than the kingdom of God of Christian dreams. The Christian ideal
of an ethical international society was thus corrupted by imperial
ambition in its very inception, and the historical realities which
sprang from it diverged even farther from any conceivable ideal. Yet
the whole political policy of the medieval church is in marked contrast
to the easy capitulation of historic Protestantism before the force
of economic and political groups. If Catholicism’s treatment of the
moral problems of the individual represents the relaxation of the
tension between religion and life, and its social and political policy
represents the compromise which follows inevitably upon the conflict of
the ideal with the moral inertia of life, its monasticism represents
the strategy of religion when it seeks to maintain an absolute tension
between its ideal and historic reality.

The various ascetic movements which prospered under the general
ægis of the medieval church represent so many different types of
religious idealism that no generalization about them will be accurate.
Protestantism reacted violently from the monastic ideal and therefore
has been able to see nothing in monasticism but a selfish flight
from life’s realities. Monasticism may be a retreat from life, but
at its best it was not a selfish retreat. Its development of the
arts, its emphasis on learning, its vast philanthropies and its
religious zeal for those outside of the monastic walls are not selfish
characteristics. It did sometimes degenerate into a very odious type
of spiritual selfishness and pride; but if we judge it by its typical
exemplars, we cannot accuse it of a lack of social passion. The
religious fervor of Catholic ascetics has been matched by Protestant
mystics, but their ethical insights have never been excelled. Their
superior moral shrewdness was revealed in their ability to detect
the perils to the ethical ideal which are covert in the natural and,
from any obvious perspective, virtuous social relationships. They saw
that the family, in itself the most virtuous of human groups, could
easily become the occasion for disloyalty to high fealties of the
soul. “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me,” Jesus had said, and no one in the history of the church seems
to have understood the problem with which he dealt in those words as
well as Catholic ascetics. It must be said that the celibacy of the
monasteries was not prompted solely by the desire to avoid conflicting
loyalties; it sprang partly from a morbid evaluation of the sexual
relation. That was probably the weakest and least worthy characteristic
of medieval asceticism. Its understanding of the perils to the spirit
in the possessive instinct was perhaps its finest bit of insight. It
understood how easily the privilege and power which spring from the
possession of property may corrupt the soul with pride and destroy a
loving relationship between individuals. It therefore insisted upon the
vow of poverty. In all these problems the insight of asceticism was
superior to its strategy. It saw peril in ordinary human relationships
where most modern Christians are unable to detect them; but it knew of
no way to overcome the peril except by destroying the relationships
and building its unique fellowship of the spirit upon the basis of
celibacy, poverty and absolute obedience. In asceticism the flowers of
the spirit are cut from the roots by which they are supported and life
is destroyed in the process of its purification. Asceticism creates a
high type of ethical spirituality which cannot be universalized without
completely destroying society; and the virtue which it develops can
be maintained only in its own artificial media and therefore lacks
redemptive force. The great medieval ascetics have always claimed
Jesus as their authority though he was not an ascetic in their sense.
He disassociated himself from the asceticism of John the Baptist,
who had come “neither eating nor drinking,” and unlike the ascetics
he had no morbid fears of natural enjoyments. Protestantism has
therefore regarded asceticism as the result of a foolish literalism
which failed to allow for poetic latitude in the words of Jesus.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that both his words and his practice
have a closer affinity to medieval asceticism at its best than to
any modern spiritualized worldliness which tries vainly to unite the
largest number of spiritual graces with the greatest possible temporal
advantages. Francis of Assisi was surely more like the real Jesus than
Bruce Barton’s modernized caricature of the original. The strategy of
Jesus might be described as a leaning in the direction of asceticism,
as a hovering upon its brink. He is saved from its morbid temper by
the wholesome common sense which leavens all his attitudes. The virtue
of asceticism lies in its ability to detect the perils to a virtuous
life in the necessary and inevitable social relationships in which all
individual personality must develop; its limitation is its inclination
to destroy the relationships in order to overcome the peril. Religious
idealism, nurtured in the individualism of Protestantism, fails to
appreciate the virtue of asceticism, while it condemns its limitations
because it fails to realize how fundamentally all individual ethical
achievements are qualified by the society in which men live. Wherever
that fact is fully understood, every honest effort to maintain
the purity of the religious ideal will result in strategies which
will approximate asceticism at many points and which may excel it
only in the ability to avoid its depreciation, occasionally morbid
depreciation, of the ordinary functions of life.

Protestantism’s reactions to the problems of preserving a sense of
tension between religion and life have been a little more varied than
those of the medieval church because of the multifarious nature of its
historic forms. But varied as may be the strategies of the various
churches, they do not finally differ from the three which Catholicism
employed, i.e., capitulation without a struggle, compromise after a
struggle, and victory gained through the device of avoiding some of
the issues. The marked differences between the medieval and the modern
church lie in the areas of life where the struggle between religion
and human inertia was attempted, where the compromises were made and
where the victories were won. If Catholicism left the individual to his
own devices, the churches of the Reformation followed a similar course
in dealing with the moral problems of all human groups. The state was
completely secularized under Protestant influence. The Reformation was
in some of its aspects simply a simultaneous revolt of the various new
nations of Europe against the restraints of the international papacy.
In Germany, Scotland and finally in England, the nationalistic motive
was a decided force in destroying the prestige of the old religion.
Lutheranism capitulated much more easily to the secular state than
Calvinism, which tried in fact to maintain the ancient controls upon
political life. But once the Reformation had destroyed the old unity of
Western society and the prestige of the organization which maintained
it, secular nationalism became the universal characteristic of Western
civilization. Even Calvinism, which was ambitious to dominate the
policy of political states, hardly had the opportunity of affecting
international relations. Its influence barely went beyond domestic
policy, and there it was less interested in the morality of the state
than in the legal enforcement of individual moral ideals. The greed
and lust for power of national groups is not a unique characteristic
of the modern world; but our own era takes the moral autonomy of
the nation for granted more generally than did the Middle Ages. The
Protestant church did not create Machiavellian politics but it was more
impotent before unscrupulous nationalism than any other institution of
the religious ideal, and its impotence was partly due to its lack of
interest in social problems.

The emancipation of economic relations from all ethical restraint
was more or less concomitant with the Reformation movements, but it
is a question how much it was causally and how much coincidentally
related. Tawney[7] thinks that the growing complexity of commercial
transactions invalidated the old canonical laws designed to enforce
ethical standards in business, and thus made the secularization of
economics inevitable even before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin
were as anxious as the fathers of the medieval church to preserve moral
standards in business. But they were no more ingenious than these in
devising new and more flexible methods of control when the prohibition
of usury and the fixation of a just price were swept away by a growing
commerce which made money-lending an incident of commercial enterprise
rather than a philanthropic device, and which engulfed the standards by
which a just price was determined in a sea of economic relativities.
Luther was completely baffled by the intricacies of the new world and
could do little more than try vehemently but futilely to maintain the
old prohibition against usury and insinuate meanwhile that the recently
developed system of international banking was in some mysterious way
related to the evil conspiracies of the papacy. Calvinism, true to its
genius, was more ambitious in dealing with the problems of commerce; so
much so in fact that Beza’s thunderous denunciations of covetousness
prompted the Geneva Council to declare that he stirred up class hatred
against the wealthy. Yet it was Calvin who finally destroyed the last
vestige of medievalism in economics by justifying interest. Though his
action prompted the charge that “usury was the brat of heresy,” he
probably did no more than to recognize the logic inherent in the facts
of a new economic development. There was no more conscious desire to
emancipate commercial life from the sanctions of morality and religion
in Protestantism than in the ancient church; but the preoccupation of
the leaders of the Reformation with the problem of the inner life and
the general temper of individualism which characterized the Protestant
churches undeniably accelerated the processes of secularization. In
time Adam Smith rather than Thomas Aquinas became the moral authority
of the commercial world, and, whatever may have been the futile fury of
the early reformers, Protestantism did finally accept the economics of
laissez faire and habituated itself to a world in which vast areas or
life were withdrawn not only from the influence of religiously inspired
ethical ideals, but from every ethical sanction whatsoever. Thus was
the present world created in which “business is business” and “politics
is politics,” i.e., in which the non-moral character of two of the most
important social relationships of mankind is taken for granted.

If Protestantism made its easy capitulation before the larger social
groups of mankind and its premature peace with them, it developed
its most stubborn resistance to the natural appetites of men in
its influence upon the individual life. It was precisely in that
area of life in which the medieval church was least effective that
Protestantism displayed its highest ambition. At this point it becomes
impossible to speak in general terms of Protestantism, for the
strategies of Calvinism and Lutheranism in dealing with the problems
of the inner life differ widely, even more widely than their social
policies. The unique characteristics of either are frequently the
common characteristics of Protestantism when viewed from some external
perspective; but an intimate view may reveal them in the light of very
different religions. Calvinism is religion’s most energetic effort to
master the ethical life of the individual. In some of its historic
forms, in Geneva and Scotland and the American colonies for instance,
its social policy was ambitious enough to compare with that of Pope
Gregory, but its chief interest was not in the social institution as
such. It merely used the political power to reinforce an uncompromising
ethical rigor in the life of the individual. In Calvinism the religion
of the modern world makes its boldest bid for the ethical mastery of
life. Calvinism believed that life could be dominated by the spiritual
and ethical ideal if the individual could be persuaded to control
his appetites and to overcome his natural indolence. A temperate,
industrious, thrifty and honest individual was, in its esteem, the
perfect exemplar of the religious ideal and the stuff out of which a
new society could be built. It never faced the problem of the conflict
between the ideal in the soul of the individual and the intractable
forces in human society because its moral ideals were socially and
economically very useful and it could therefore indulge the illusion
that economic success, social well-being and obvious happiness are
the natural and inevitable fruits of the religious life. Hence it was
a religion admirably suited for the middle classes who rose to power
in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, for it endowed
them with virtues which would insure their success and it doubled their
zeal by giving religious sanction to their secular enterprises. The
ancient and medieval world had given moral precedence to a life of
leisure and meditation, whether of aristocrat or philosopher, of monk
or priest. Calvinism was as contemptuous of luxury and leisure as of
the arts and amenities which flourished in them. Its sanctification
of the common task, of manual toil and of commercial enterprise was
in itself a valuable contribution to social progress. It was in a way
the spiritual foundation upon which the whole structure of modern
civilization has been built. It developed a high type of honesty
without which the intricate credit relationships of modern commerce
would have been impossible. It encouraged a diligence which was the
driving force in establishing the commercial classes in power over a
moribund aristocracy. Its religiously inspired habits of continence
and temperance gave the lower classes a sense of moral dignity and a
natural self-respect which they needed in challenging the pride and
complacency of the aristocratic world. These puritan virtues have
moreover given the whole north European world and America (which is
more puritan than any nation, because here the puritan life flourished
on virgin soil and remained unqualified by the vestiges of medievalism
which remain firmly imbedded in the culture of even the most modern
European nations) a robust vitality and moral urge which have had no
small part in developing their political hegemony in the modern world.

The conflict of puritan religion with the world has however resulted in
the inevitable compromise between the religious ideal and the world’s
primitive urges and desires. Its moral weakness lies in its naïve
confidence of victory over the world and its inability to discover
the relativities and qualifications which history has wrought upon
its absolute. If the spiritual idealism of Jesus is the norm for
Christians, the Calvinists and puritans diverged from it more seriously
than they knew in the very conception of their ideal. The love and
reverence for personality which is the basis of the ethics of Jesus
is totally lacking in Calvinism. It knows how to create self-respect
but lacks the imagination to inculcate a religious respect for others,
except possibly for the respectable. Its confidence in the obvious
rewards of virtue tempted it to abhor poverty and hold the poor
in contempt, though they might become the helpful occasion for the
exercise of that philanthropy without which the idea of Christian
stewardship could not be realized. While early Calvinism had an heroic
mood which would have scorned to make a concession to the selfishness
of man through the sanctification of prudential ethics, its ethical
theories did nevertheless lend themselves to easy appropriation by
moralists who were intent upon identifying the social good with a
decent selfishness. The uncompromising spirituality of the ethics of
Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. Its moral theories were in
fact derived from the Old rather than the New Testament; and there
is hardly a scintilla of evidence in Calvinistic thought that the
Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the scripture which it accepted as
revealed finality. Its very bibliolatry was partly responsible for its
non-Christian type of ethics, for through it the casual moral theories
of the early Hebrews achieved the dignity of absolute truth. Lack
of historical perspective in the use of the Old Testament further
aggravated this error, for the real worth of the prophets was never
appreciated and their high type of moral idealism could not serve
to qualify the less heroic morality of the law and the superficial
moralizing of the Wisdom literature. Incidentally it may be observed
that bibliolatry is one of the handicaps to moral progress in almost
all religions. Through it primitive cultures and moral customs which
happen to be enshrined in the canon become absolutely authoritative,
and the weight of their influence is set against new ventures in moral
life.

If Calvinistic and puritan idealism departed from its assumed norm in
its very conception, the moral realities which issued from it bore even
less resemblance to the absolute idealism of the ethics of Jesus. Its
unqualified confidence in the power of individual virtue to overcome
the world and change society contributed to the relaxation of moral
restraints upon social institutions and the secularization of society
to which reference has been made. Its sanctification of secular tasks
led inevitably to a sanctification of secular motives which it did not
desire but could not prevent. Men were to serve God by diligence in
their daily toil. But what was the end of industry which endowed it
with virtue? The puritan answer was to regard work as an end in itself,
an emphasis which it learned to make in its reaction to monastic
and aristocratic idleness. But that answer alone could not suffice.
Inevitably the material gains which were the rewards of industry were
given a special religious sanction. “If God show you a way in which
you may lawfully get more than in another way, without wrong to your
soul or to any other, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful,
you cross one of the ends of your Calling and refuse to be God’s
steward,” said Governor Bradford.[8] The ancient and medieval world
had been more or less scornful of the pursuit of wealth and abounded
in characters among both the nobility and the peasantry who thought
it beneath their dignity to increase their patrimony. The religious
sanction of material gain was a new thing in history and undoubtedly
helped to fashion the moral temper of modern society in which diligence
is the great virtue and greed the besetting vice.[9] It is the puritan
heritage of America which gives a clew to the paradox of our national
life. It explains how we can be at the same time the most religious and
the most materialistic of all modern nations.

If puritanism failed to see how easily the virtue of thrift might
be transmuted into the vice of avarice, it was even less careful to
guard the righteous soul against the perils to virtue which inhere
in the power which wealth supplies. There are few men who can wield
extraordinary power without making it the tool of their own desires
and without magnifying their limitations which might pass unnoticed
in less puissant individuals. Puritanism did indeed have a doctrine
of stewardship, but it was applied to the privilege which flowed from
economic power and not to the possession of power itself. There was
never enough imagination in puritanic religion to detect how nature
in the soul of man, frustrated by a discipline of the senses, comes
into its own through the sins of the mind. It knew how to redeem
human life from its vagrant passions, but it did not know how to
deal with those dominant desires, the lust for power and the greed
for gain, which express themselves more frequently in a disciplined
personality than in a chaotic one and which may be more detrimental
to the welfare of others than the consequences of undisciplined and
momentary passions. It was a spiritual discipline admirably suited to
lift the middle classes to a dominant position in society but hardly
designed to guide them in the use of the power once they had achieved
it. Even its abhorrence of luxury and prohibition of extravagance is
finally softened in a civilization which has profited all too well by
its virtues and is tempted to destroy them by the very advantages which
the virtues supplied. John Wesley, who revived puritan morality after
it had declined in its original form, saw this problem more clearly
than his predecessors, but he had no answer for it except to advocate
philanthropic generosity. He writes in his _Journal_: “Religion must
necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot
but produce riches. But as riches increase so will pride, anger and
love of the world in all its branches.... So although the form of
religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no
way to prevent this—this continual decay of pure religion? We ought
not prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all
Christians to gain all they can and save all they can; that is, in
effect, to grow rich. What way then can we take that our money may not
sink us in the nethermost hell? There is one way and there is no other
under heaven. If those who gain all they can and save all they can
will likewise give all they can, then the more they give the more will
they grow in grace and the more treasure will they lay in heaven.”[10]
Wesley, of course, could hardly be expected to appreciate that money
represents power even more than privilege in modern society, and that
philanthropy may become a method of satisfying the ego and displaying
power.

Many of the moral and religious limitations of modern civilization
may be attributed first to the partial victory and then to the
self-destruction of puritan religion in modern civilization. In
puritanism religion made one of its boldest advances upon the world;
and so confident was it of victory that it prepared no one for the
moral relativities which were the inevitable issue of its enterprise.
In dealing with the stubborn resistance of the material world it is
better to expect victory than to assume defeat before the battle is
begun. Yet an undue confidence may be as dangerous to the enterprise
as a timorous spirit. The medieval ascetics who regarded all human
relationships with a critical spirit, and rather expected the old
Adam to assert himself in seemingly the most innocent human concerns,
possessed spiritual insights which were totally lacking in the typical
puritan. He expected to build a society in which the scripture was
“really and materially to be fulfilled.”

It will have been noted that Calvinism and puritanism have been used
in this discussion as interchangeable terms. The fact is that, while
the two terms are not synonymous theologically, the moral temper of
Calvinism was so potent in the whole non-Lutheran Protestant world that
all of the various denominations were indoctrinated with its puritan
spirit. The various sects had their own theological peculiarities, but
in their puritan spirit they were essentially one. Only the Quakers
departed from it; for George Fox had discovered the ethics of Jesus,
and the religion of the Friends was ever after to express itself in
terms relevant to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Denominations
such as the Baptists and Methodists who evangelized Western America
gave a rebirth to the puritan spirit when it suffered decay in its more
native haunts. Their history is additional evidence for the thesis
that puritanism is a religious sublimation of the life of the middle
classes. For when the heroic spirit of puritanism declined in those
classes which it had lifted to power, it was reborn in the lower middle
classes of England and the Western pioneers of America. Methodism
is theologically as unrelated to Calvinism as can be imagined. Its
theological presuppositions are really more congenial to a dynamic
puritanism than those of Calvinism; for the moral vigor of Calvinism
was logically incompatible with its deterministic faith. Denominations
such as the Baptists and Methodists with their strong emphasis on
regeneration as the basis of church membership aggravated one weakness
of Protestantism, for all of their spiritual vigor. Their tests of what
constituted regeneration were drawn from religious experience rather
than from its moral fruits; yet they were bound to assume that a marked
moral contrast existed between the saved and the unsaved. Thus they
accentuated what Professor A. Whitehead has defined as the Protestant
oversimplification of ethics, i.e., a tendency to judge men, in spite
of the intricacy of their inner life and the complexity of their
social relations, as being either good or bad. This is simply another
aspect of Protestant individualism, but it is an aspect which emerges
more clearly in the free churches which have renounced all ambition
to have a membership coextensive with the citizenship of the state
than in those churches in which some vestige of the state-church idea
still remains. The superior spiritual vigor of churches which make
a religious experience the prerequisite of fellowship in the church
may well be conceded; but that does not change the fact that ethical
values in a complex civilization are frequently imperiled by the
oversimplification of moral issues, which is the inevitable by-product
of simple religious tests. Men are neither totally good nor totally bad
when they live in a society which may corrupt the virtuous intention of
the most robust idealist, or when their own inner life is so complex
that moral purpose may express itself in one of its areas and be
betrayed in another. There is a moral simplicity in Protestantism which
is closely related to its individualism and which is particularly
unfortunate, since it is the characteristic of a religion which orients
the ethical life of peoples who have tremendous responsibilities in the
complex life of Western civilization.

Calvinism has frequently been referred to as Protestant asceticism.[11]
Its robust moral energies are indeed commensurate with the strict
ethical discipline of medieval monasticism, but with this difference:
that one is developed within the world and the other outside of the
world of ordinary human relations. But it is precisely this difference
which makes Lutheranism more closely related to asceticism than
Calvinism; for Lutheranism is the Protestant way of despairing of
the world and of claiming victory for the religious ideal without
engaging the world in combat. Both are founded upon an ethical
dualism. The medieval ascetic flees from the world into the monastery
and there attempts realization of his religious ideal; the Lutheran
quietist flees from the world into the asylum of his inner life
where he comes into the emotional possession of the ideal without
risking its refinements in the world of cruel realities. The one has
a dualism which divides the monastic from ordinary men; the other
draws the line within the soul of each individual and expects him to
realize in his religious experience what he cannot reveal in ordinary
human relations. If Calvinism is _Weltfreundlich_, Lutheranism like
asceticism is _Weltfeindlich_. It has little hope that a kingdom of God
will be established upon earth, except perhaps through supernatural
intervention. It places all its emphasis upon the sentiment of Jesus:
“The kingdom of God is within you.” It must be admitted that Jesus’
conception of the kingdom of God is probably as much related to
quietistic religion as to puritan morality, though ascetic religion
seems closer to him than either. The modern church has dismissed the
eschatological element in Jesus’ teachings as the Semitic shell in
which Jesus developed his conception of the kingdom of God as a social
ideal; but it was more probably his way of expressing doubt that his
ideal could ever be realized in history except by a miracle of God.
Yet the apocalyptic element in the gospel was qualified by the idea
of the kingdom to be realized by evolutionary process. The kingdom
of God was also “like unto a mustard seed.” Jesus in short was both
pessimistic and optimistic in regard to the spiritual potentialities of
human society, and in his paradoxical rather than consistent position
he was able to maintain the tension between religion and life in a way
which has escaped both parties in the churches of the Reformation. Of
this more will be said later. The attitude of Lutheran piety toward the
world has the merit and the limitation characteristic of all pessimism.
It sharpens the ideal but despairs of its realization. Lutheran
doctrine was fashioned out of the religious experiences of a tumultuous
soul seeking peace and failing to find it in any of the institutions
which were meant to incarnate the religious ideal or in any of the
observance which were intended to express it. The institution shocked
him by their imperfections, and the observances and rituals had
undergone the inevitable process which reduces a necessary symbolism
to a kind of magic in which the symbol achieves potencies originally
ascribed only to the ineffable truth or reality for which it stands.
From all historic relativities of the institutions and superficialities
of religious rites Luther reacted and discovered his absolute in the
religious experience in which the soul appropriates the grace of God.
In that mystic communion all natural imperfections of the human spirit
are transcended and the soul is lifted out of the relativities of time
and circumstance. It is easy to see how inevitable is this emphasis in
the history of religion but also how perilous it may become to moral
values. It is inevitable because every sensitive conscience suffers at
times from a realization that “our reach is beyond our grasp,” that
moral capacities are not equal to the goals set by imagination and
hope. The apostle Paul, whose religious experience closely paralleled
those of Luther and whose theology therefore became authoritative for
him, complained: “... the good that I would, I do not; but the evil
which I would not, that I do.... For I delight in the law of God after
the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against
the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin
that is in my members. O wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver
me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord.”[12] That is a classic statement of the dualism in life which
every religion is tempted to overcome by transcending it. Lutheranism
was in fact but a revival of Pauline Christianity and it was Pauline
Christianity which had built the Christian church. In it the tension
between religion and life which is maintained in the religious idealism
of Jesus is relaxed and the sensitive soul is given the assurance that
a merciful God will know how to complete what is so incomplete and
how to perfect our manifest imperfections. Thus the same Jesus who in
the gospels is a bold adventurer of the spirit who challenges his
disciples to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect becomes in
the epistles the symbol of the divine grace which knows how to accept
our intentions for our achievements. It may be unfair to speak of a
conflict between the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul; for it
was a heavenly Father and not a jealous judge who was central in the
thought of Jesus, and his emphasis upon forgiveness shocked the strict
moralists of his day. But if there is no conflict at this point, there
is a marked change in emphasis. In the one the appropriation of divine
grace is a necessary part of the moral adventure; in the other it is
separated from the moral enterprise and easily becomes a substitute
for it. Paul had indeed disavowed all antinomian tendencies in his
doctrine of grace. “What shall we then say? Shall we continue to sin
that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin,
live any longer therein?” Obviously the mystical experience in both
the Pauline and the Lutheran religion was not unrelated to the life of
moral purpose and was not consciously used to obviate the necessity
for moral enterprise. But what is to prevent men from making a
premature appropriation of the peace it guarantees, before and without
deserving it? In that lies a peril to morality in almost all religion
which Pauline and Lutheran theology did not create but which it may
accentuate. It is well to remember that some of the greatest perils to
morality in the life of religion arise out of its most cherished and
necessary characteristics. Religion is at once the necessary partner
and the potential foe of moral life.

The quietistic tendencies of religion, particularly as elaborated by
Pauline and Lutheran theology, are less dangerous in a simple society
than in a complex one. Ethical attitudes in simple social relations
flow almost automatically out of a religious experience, even though
the conscious interpretation of the experience is scornful of the
“righteousness of works.” But in the secondary and more complex
social relationships the moral urge which issues out of the religious
experience is easily frustrated by the intricacies and relativities
of historic realities and institutions. How shall the soul preserve
the sense of the absolute which it has gained in the religious
experience from contamination by the sins which are covert in all
social relations? It is in the varying answers of quietistic religion
to that question that its ethical limitations are vividly revealed.
One answer is to avoid conflict with political and social institutions
on the score that they are divinely ordained. “Let every soul be
subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the
powers that be are ordained of God,” said the apostle Paul. When it is
remembered that the reference is to the government of the Roman empire,
the social conservatism implicit in this logic is obvious. It was this
attitude of Paul which made it easy for Luther to bring his church
into such intimate union with the various governments of Germany and
to maintain an attitude bordering on subservience toward the German
princes. The political conservatism of Lutheranism has since been its
unvarying characteristic and has had its marked effects upon history,
in no period more so than in that of the World War. State churches of
any kind easily become the tools of the secular state, but Lutheran
state churches have usually been more compliant tools than the Anglican
church, for instance, which has never quite renounced the old Catholic
ambitions of partnership with the state.

Another method of which quietistic religion avails itself in dealing
with the world is to assume that its ideal will somehow achieve
automatic realization in the intricacies of economic and social life.
This method is hardly consistent with its pessimism, but it satisfies
the desire for practical results which is bound to assert itself in
even the most supra-moral religion. Thus Luther declares:[13] “There
can be no better instructions in ... all transactions in temporal
goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to
himself these commandments: ‘What you would that others should do
unto you, do ye also to them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If
these were followed out, then everything would arrange and instruct
itself; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for
everyone’s heart and conscience would guide him.” It is a conceit of
religious people, by no means confined to Lutherans, that a vigorous
statement of the ideal ought to result in its realization. No one can
estimate how often the pulpit has insisted in these latter days that
war could be abolished if only the nations “would live according to
the law of Christ.” This characteristic frequently gives the church’s
pronouncements a curious air of futility; for ideals are neither
challenged nor applied if they are not finally embodied in concrete
proposals for specific situations. It is in such situations that the
ideal meets its real test and runs the peril of corruption. Frequently
the tendency of religion to be content with the statement of abstract
principles is due to a want of intellectual vigor which results easily
from religion’s mistrust of reason.

A method of dealing with the world which is more consistent with the
essential dualism of quietistic religion is its effort to give some
realization to the ideal by means of subjective religious emotion which
transcends the imperfections of society without attempting to change
them. Thus the ideal of brotherhood is to be realized by a religious
appreciation of all men as brothers, however much economic and social
facts may give the lie to the ideal. This was the apostle Paul’s
method of dealing with slavery and Luther emulated it in his attitude
toward the peasant’s revolt. Nothing gives a more illuminating clue
to the conservative implications of this type of religion than this
incident in the Reformation. The peasants, suffering in a state of
semi-slavery, saw in Luther’s statement of the gospel principles of
freedom, and in the religious ideal of the equal worth of all souls,
implicit in Christian teaching, a justification for their revolt
against the intolerable conditions of serfdom. They declared: “It has
been custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which
is pitiable enough considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed
us all, the lowly as well as the great, by the shedding of his precious
blood. Accordingly it is consistent with scripture that we should be
free and should wish to be so. We therefore take it for granted that
you will release us from serfdom as true Christians, unless it should
be shown from the gospels that we are serfs.”[14] Luther violently
disavowed this practical application of his gospel. “This article
would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ
into an external worldly one. Impossible. An earthly kingdom cannot
exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs,
some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘In Christ there is
neither bond nor free.’” The violence of Luther’s reaction in this
instance was partly due to considerations of expediency; for he feared
to lose caste with the princes by having the Reformation identified
with radical political movements; yet it is fairly faithful to his
general conceptions of the nature and function of religion. Obviously
the dualism of Protestantism which separates the religious experience
of the individual from the social realities in which alone personality
can achieve significance has defects which are more perilous to social
values than the ethical dualism of medieval monasticism. If the ideal
is to be withdrawn from life to save it from corruption, it is better
that it be realized in some social medium, however artificial, than
that it be suspended in the thin air of religious sentiment and be
realized only in subjective experience.

An analysis of the various strategies of religion in establishing
contact with the historic situations and social realities in which it
must function reveals, in short, that it can pursue no course which
is altogether free of peril to its moral values. Capitulation without
conflict reduces religion to magic and secularizes life. A stubborn
conflict with the intractable forces of nature and history results in
some kind of compromise. Neither papal internationalism nor puritan
plutocracy are what the idealists who were responsible for them really
desired. And what they really desired fell short of their pretended
goals. Withdrawal from the world is equally dangerous. For it may
lead either to the morbid artificialities of asceticism or to the
sentimental subjectivism of quietistic religion. There are values in
each of the various strategies as well as perils. Perhaps those who
are too critical of their limitations can never create their values.
Religion must create its values in naïve faith and subject their
limitations to a critical intelligence. Of the various strategies
asceticism is probably nearest to the real genius of religion and most
adequate for the moral needs of our day. If a world is completely
astray the higher perspective from which it may be convicted of sin and
the greater dynamic which may function redemptively in its life both
depend upon some kind of detachment of religion from life.




                               CHAPTER VI

                SOCIAL COMPLEXITY AND ETHICAL IMPOTENCE


While there is good reason to regret the individualism of Protestantism
in a civilization which has increased the intimacy of all human
relations and made social and economic interdependence a basic fact,
yet it alone cannot be held responsible for the unethical nature
of modern society. This is attributable as much to the greater
difficulties which the human conscience faces in modern life as to any
weakness in the moral and religious idealism by which it is informed. A
much more adequate type of religious idealism might have been unequal
to the task of preserving ethical values in modern life.

The gradual secularization of economics through the growing complexity
of commercial relations has been a previous interest of our study. When
it became inconvenient and difficult to make simple moral standards,
expressed in prohibitions of usury and maintenance of a “just price,”
fit the new intricacies of international commerce and industrial
production, we have seen how men turned naturally and inevitably to the
consoling reflection that “in the providence of God life is so arranged
that each man seeking his own shall serve the common weal.” The
doctrine of laissez faire was in other words as much an admission of
defeat on the part of the moral forces of society as it was a conscious
effort toward secularization. Other factors beside a growing complexity
of social life helped however to secularize modern society. Modern
commerce and industry tend to increase the extent of coöperative effort
while they diminish personal contacts. World commerce and large-scale
production make human beings interdependent without offering them
the opportunity of entering upon personal associations. There is a
natural sympathy in the soul which saves men from actions which are
very obviously detrimental to their fellows. But if they are unable to
survey the consequences of their actions or to gauge the reactions to
their attitudes in the lives of others, their temptation to unethical
conduct is materially increased. The master of a manufacturing unit
in the old handcraft period of industry thus found it much easier to
maintain moral relations to his workers than a modern, frequently
absentee, owner of a large factory. If in addition ownership becomes
collective, with the resulting division of responsibility, while the
number of workers increases until individuals lose their significance
in the mass, the problem of making industrial relations ethical is
further complicated. Ethical conduct is, in its last analysis, based
upon reverence for personality; and personality fails to make its
appeal to the conscience when considered in the mass and when regarded
at too long range. In such circumstances a degree of intelligence and
imagination, which mankind has not yet achieved, is required to gauge
the effect of industrial and commercial policy upon the individuals who
are involved in it. The unethical nature of modern civilization with
its destruction of confidence in the moral integrity of human nature
and with its deterministic obsessions is largely due to its mechanical
perfections which have increased the extent of social coöperation while
they have decreased personal contacts.

The same means of commerce and communication which have increased
the size of industrial groups and extended the range of commercial
transactions have also enlarged the political units and increased
interdependence between them. We are living in a world in which a
financial depression in America results in a panic upon the silk
exchange of Tokio; in which a boycott upon cotton goods initiated by
a Gandhi in India throws thousands of cotton spinners in Manchester
into unemployment; and in which Western industrialism may exploit
Chinese labor in the seaports of China without one beneficiary of this
industrialism out of a million being able to make a mental picture
of the social consequences of the commercial policies from which he
benefits. The difficulty of these long-range relationships is further
complicated by the fact that the participants are separated not only
by great distances but by the barriers of race and nationality. All
social decencies in the past have developed within the bounds of the
group, and men have not yet learned to treat individuals in other
groups with confidence, respect and honesty. Attitudes of tenderness,
sympathy and affection have been confined very largely to the family
group. From this intimate group they were finally sluiced out to
effect social relations in larger groups, but they have not changed
inter-group relations. Civilization has increased the size of groups in
which human relations have an ethical basis, but it has not moralized
the action of the group nor taught individuals in one social group
to treat individuals in other groups with the respect and confidence
which a wholesome social life requires. The connotation of contempt
which the Jews placed in the word “gentile” and the Greeks in the word
“barbarian” may be matched in the terminology of practically every
people. When groups are geographically separated, as in the case of
political states, fear and misunderstanding are multiplied by the
ignorance which results from a lack of contacts. But contacts alone
do not remove them; for the relations of political, social and racial
groups within the boundaries of the same state are only slightly
more ethical, as for instance the relation between white and colored
people in the United States or of the Scotch and Irish in Ulster.
Human imagination and intelligence have not been equal to the task of
extending ethical attitudes beyond the boundaries of the group.

The ethical problem of group relations is made still more difficult
by the expansive desires and unethical attitudes which develop
naturally within the group as a corporate entity. That is, groups as
such find it even more difficult to maintain moral attitudes toward
other groups than do the individuals within it toward individuals in
other racial or political unities. All human groups tend to be more
predatory than the individuals which compose them. The most tender
emotions may characterize the relations of members of a family to
each other; but the family as such is easily tempted to gain its
advantages at the expense of other families. The tendency of family
loyalty to accentuate covetousness has been frequently noted by social
observers who have seen the family instinct as the very basis of the
sanctity which civilization has given private property. Religious
organizations are not free of the imperial ambitions which come
naturally to social groups of every kind. One fruitful cause of the
dilution of religious idealism is the desire of religious groups to
gain power and prestige among larger numbers. They therefore soften
the rigor of their ideal that it may captivate the morally mediocre
majority. Both employers and employees frequently find agreement in
specific cases of conflict difficult because the policies of both are
determined by considerations of loyalty to their respective groups.
Of all human groups the political state is probably most inclined to
unethical conduct. It was a dictum of George Washington’s that a nation
was not to be trusted beyond its interests, and history supports the
justice of his observation. After shrewdly observing the statesmen of
England equivocate on the attitude of their nation toward the southern
rebellion until they could determine their policy by considerations
of expediency, Henry Adams came to the melancholy conclusion that
masses of men were always moved by interest and never by conscience
and that morality is a private and a costly luxury.[15] One reason
why the relations of nations to each other are still characterized
by primitive fears and excessive caution is because their actions
have not, as a matter of fact, been morally dependable. The problem
of making nations and other groups conform to ethical standards of
any kind is particularly difficult because the ethical attitude of
the individual toward his group easily obscures the unethical nature
of the group’s desires. The patriot identifies his tender emotions
toward his nation with the attitude of the nation itself until he
becomes incapable of a critical appraisal of its policy; or he frankly
condones the selfishness of the nation because he recognizes no ethical
values beyond those implicit in group loyalty. The father of a family
may feel moral pride in essentially selfish pursuits because he means
to secure advantages by them not for himself but for his family.
Loyalty to “the firm” may give the business man a consciousness of
virtue even though it forces him to connive in predatory practices
of his concern. The class-conscious worker may be willing to disrupt
society in the interest of his class because all his moral needs are
satisfied by his devotion to what he regards as the most significant
social group. While this ethical paradox of patriotism is obviously
not confined to political groups, the nation is most seriously tempted
to unethical conduct because it is not a voluntary association, its
group is conveniently isolated from others and loyalty to it is least
qualified by other conflicting loyalties. It may be set down as a truth
of almost axiomatic finality, that groups tend to be unethical in
proportion to the degree of unqualified loyalty which they are able
to claim or exact of their members. In this connection it may be noted
that democracy has increased rather than diminished the imperialism
of nations, for it has given patriotism a higher moral sanction and
thus reduced the moral scruples which might qualify the loyalty of
their citizens. The arrogance of nations and their insistence on moral
autonomy has developed simultaneously with the extension of democracy.
It is this ethical paradox of patriotism which invalidates the
contention that the root of all imperialism is the imperialism of the
individual. It is true of course that group loyalty may become a device
for delegating our vices to the group and imagining ourselves virtuous.
Some types of political arrogance and race prejudice are obviously
methods of compensating individuals for their lack of opportunity
to bully their immediate neighbors. Yet on the whole the unethical
character of group action is determined as much by the partial virtues
as by the vices of individuals.

The problem of bringing groups under some kind of ethical control is
not new in history. It has become unusually difficult in the modern
world not only because of the consolidation of the authority of the
state but also because rapid means of communication have increased the
size of social, political and economic units and made relations between
them more intricate. The larger the unit the more unqualified seems
to be the moral sanction which loyalty to it may claim. To an average
citizen, immersed in his parochial interests, the nation appears in the
light of a universal community in contrast to the smaller and voluntary
communities within the nation. Yet this same nation is one of many
human groups, most of which betray imperial desires reminiscent of Rome
but which aspire in vain after the universal dominion which gave Roman
imperialism a measure of moral worth. Treitschke, whose philosophy of
history was the object of so much opprobrium during the World War that
its faithfulness to the general prejudices of Western life would hardly
be surmised, presented the nation as the ultimate community because
all smaller societies are too petty to deserve and all larger ones too
vague and abstract to claim the unqualified allegiance of men.

The intricacies and propinquities of an industrial civilization tend at
some points to increase the imperial desires of nations and at others
to make their ordinary lusts more deadly. The feud between Germany
and France is a very ancient one, but the need of French industry
for German coal and of German industry for French iron explains some
aspects of their present difficulties which are not derived from
ancient animosities. Modern industry needs a unified world and, lacking
it, each nation is inclined to seek the completion of its industrial
establishment by the forcible appropriation of territory, rich in
needed resources. The economic imperialism of industrially advanced
nations is a product of the high productivity of modern industry which
produces more than one national unit can consume and which needs
more raw materials than the same nation can produce. Covetous eyes
are consequently turned upon undeveloped portions of the globe, rich
in raw materials and hungry for the products of modern industry. In
one sense the European war was incubated in Africa. Rapid means of
communication also extend the reach of the grasping nations. China is
attempting to throw off the shackles of a Western imperialism which
could never have gained the position it holds on Chinese soil but for
the new contiguity which has destroyed the boundaries between East and
West. Moreover, the intricacies of international commerce and finance
offer opportunities for a new kind of economic imperialism which hardly
needs, though it does not always avoid, the use of political force.
The economic forces of one nation simply penetrate the economic life
of another and, if there is a great disparity in economic power, the
weaker nation is brought under the dominion of the stronger without
the citizens of either being aware of the process by which this has
been accomplished. This is the type of imperialism which America
is most fitted and inclined to develop. In South America political
pressure does accompany economic penetration, but in Europe American
power increases under a policy of political isolation. The isolationism
of America, which has become a firmly established foreign policy
since the war, is prompted partly by the sense of power which America
feels as the richest nation of the world, and partly by a political
infantilism which tempts us both to pharisaism and to fear when dealing
with the supposedly more astute political bargainers of Europe. The
relation of America to the rest of the world is a perfect example of
the moral peril in the new intricacies of modern civilization. The
citizen of the state is as ignorant of the actual character of his
nation’s relation to other nations as of other peoples’ reactions to
the real policy of his own government. Probably not one American in a
thousand is able to comprehend a single reason why Europe should fear
or hate America and not more than one in a hundred is actually aware
of the existence of such hatreds and fears. There is therefore an
unconscious hypocrisy in the moral pretensions of the citizens of every
nation, a more or less conscious hypocrisy in the attitudes of the
governments which do not share but yet exploit the political ignorance
of the people, and an inevitable reaction of cynicism on the part of
those who know the real facts and suffer from the moral limitations
of the nation’s policy. Group relations, particularly those which are
intricate, are thus persistently unethical because part of the modern
world is too ignorant to make them ethical and the other part is so
worldly-wise that it has lost confidence in the possibility of ethical
relations. Frequently hypocrisy and cynicism are united in the same
person who knows how to discount the moral pretensions of other groups
but lacks the perspective from which he might arrive at a critical
evaluation of the real character of his own group. This curious
combination of insincerity and cynicism is obvious in the relation of
both economic and national groups, but it is particularly noticeable
in international difficulties. In the struggle between economic
groups there is a growing inclination to make no moral pretensions
on either side. Sometimes the group in power makes them but in that
case its insincerity is usually conscious rather than ignorant. In
international affairs the same patriots who ignorantly persecute every
person who seeks to qualify national loyalty or to make a dispassionate
appraisal of national policies frequently sink into moral despair and
disillusionment when history unfolds the inevitable consequences of the
anarchy of conflicting national lusts.

The task of making complex group relations ethical belongs primarily
to religion and education because statecraft cannot rise above the
universal limitations of human imagination and intelligence. A
robust ethical idealism, an extraordinary spiritual insight and a
high degree of intelligence are equally necessary for such a social
task. The difficulties of the problem are enhanced by the fact that
the religious imagination and astute intelligence which are equally
necessary for its solution are incompatible with each other. Religion
is naturally jealous of any partner in a redemptive enterprise; and
the same intelligence which is needed to guide moral purpose in a
complex situation easily lames the moral will and dulls the spiritual
insight. It is possible that this difficulty may permanently destroy
every vestige of morality in the group relations of modern society.
The necessary partnership and the inevitable conflict between the
religio-moral and the rational forces is obvious in both the political
and the economic problems of the present age.

The unqualified authority and the boundless lusts of a modern state
need first of all to be brought under the scrutiny of clear minds who
understand the implications and can gauge the consequences of its
pretensions. Patriotism is a form of altruism and as such represents
the victory of ultra-rational sanctions over the selfish inclinations
of individuals which seem quite reasonable to the average man. The
emotional attitude and ethical achievement in patriotism endows the
patriot with a kind of madness and pride which make him as scornful
of more rational types of altruism as of the prudent and cautious
selfishness with which he has his primary conflict. It is because
patriotism represents a victory of an ethical ideal that religion
so easily becomes its uncritical partner. When many hearts are cold
anything that warms them will seem religious to the undiscriminating
champion of religious values. The defects of patriotic altruism are
thus left to the correction of rationalistic idealists who know how
to discover the absurdities into which an uncritical devotion to
partial values may issue and how to envisage the larger community
of mankind of which the nation is a part. During the last war moral
idealists of rationalistic persuasion, such as Bertrand Russell, Romain
Rolland, Henri Barbusse and Bernard Shaw, were more detached in their
perspective and freer of war hysterias than any religious leaders of
equal standing. To envisage the larger community of mankind which
lacks the physical symbols of the state and to dispel the parochial
prejudices which are harbored in mediocre minds and which make hatred
of others the inevitable commitant of love for one’s own is clearly a
task to which a discriminating intelligence must contribute.

However the problem of group relations, as has been previously noted,
is created not only by the parochialism of individuals but by the lust
and greed of the group itself. The task of persuading the group to
sacrifice some of its advantages for the sake of the whole of human
society is so difficult that it almost leads to despair. If it will
ever be accomplished religio-moral forces, whatever their present
impotence, must come to the aid of reason. Prudence alone may prompt
nations to a measure of self-sacrificing action, since unqualified
self-assertion must lead to mutual destruction. But prudential morality
reveals the same defects in inter-group relations which we have noted
in simpler social problems. Its ends are always too immediate and its
perspective is too narrow. Moral action which lacks some reference to
an absolute standard and some ultra-rational dynamic inevitably falls
short even of satisfying the social necessities. The prudence of
nations in the present state of international relations tends to prompt
a few, usually neighboring nations, to compose their differences, but
for the sake and at the price of sharpening the conflict with some
other alliance of states. The net result of such an enterprise is
simply to enlarge the unit of conflict once more without abolishing
warfare. The manner in which the triple entente and the triple
alliance, both formed with high moral pretensions, helped to make the
World War inevitable is a matter of history. More recently there are
indications that France and Germany will compose their differences “for
the sake of Europe.” Such a reconciliation will hasten the unification
of Europe but will also help to raise the specter of intercontinental
wars with continental units of conflict. The unification of Asia
upon a basis of common resentment against Western imperialism is an
almost unavoidable development in international affairs. All these
continental alliances are logical enough from any immediate perspective
but dangerous from the perspective of the welfare of the whole race.
There is no indication that prudential statecraft has the resources
to prevent America from inciting the whole of Europe against our
economic overlordship of that continent. The increasing feeling aroused
by the problem of debt liquidations is symptomatic of the natural
resentment which must inevitably issue out of a relation of economic
interdependence between a very wealthy and a poor continent. For the
settlement of this issue no policy will be wise except one which will
appear very foolish to the wise statesmen. A prudent statecraft has
made the anxiety of a wealthy creditor the dominant note in American
international policy, and envy and fear the chief characteristics in
the attitudes of the peoples who must deal with us.

Social intelligence does of course produce a finer fruit than the type
of prudence which characterizes the international policy of modern
states. There is a whole class of social idealists who understand the
economic basis of most international difficulties and who would bring
peace to the warring classes and nations by an economic reorganization
of modern society. Since modern industrialism and capitalism have
materially complicated the ancient feuds between races and classes, it
is evident that no amount of moral and spiritual goodwill can produce
an ordered and stable international society if the economic roots of
war are not clearly discerned and finally eliminated. However the
same intelligence which is capable of such discernment easily drifts
into a cynicism which discounts all moral and personal factors in
social reconstruction and places its hope entirely in a new social
strategy. Loyalty to the class is substituted for loyalty to the
state, and class conflict is expected to issue in a lasting peace
for both classes and nations. Economic determinists show a superior
discernment in recognizing that in a civilization which is forced to
organize its economic life across national boundaries the conflict of
interest between classes does become more significant than the conflict
between states, particularly since the latter conflict is due either to
economic or to fantastic and imaginary causes. But their very realism
betrays them into a cynicism which finally issues in the most romantic
and unrealistic dreams. They imagine that social peace will result
from the victory of one class over all other classes. They have not
taken into account that modern capitalism produces a formidable middle
class the interests of which are not identical with the proletarians.
Moral and spiritual considerations may conceivably prompt this class
to make common cause with the workers in the attainment of ethical
social ends, but it will never be annihilated even by the most ruthless
class conflict nor will it be persuaded by the logic of economic facts
that its interests are altogether identical with those of the workers.
Even if one class were able to eliminate all other classes, which is
hardly probable, it would require some social grace and moral dynamic
to preserve harmony between the various national groups by which this
vast mass would be organized and into which it would disintegrate. Even
within one national unit any economic class will dissolve into various
groups, according to varying and sometimes conflicting interests, as
soon as its foes are eliminated. The Russian communists were not long
able to preserve their absolute solidarity after their revolution was
firmly established. The dominant group soon learned that no amount of
ruthlessness was able to prevent the gradual formation of a minority
group under Trotzky and Zinoviev. Significantly, the conflict of
interest between peasants and industrial workers is the real basis of
this schism within communist ranks.

In Europe the qualification of patriotism by class loyalties has in
some instances led to a mitigation of national animosities, but it has
not destroyed them. On the contrary it has added new hatreds to the
old and created a society which is divided not only by vertical but
also by horizontal divisions. The Marxian idea of the unification of
the world upon the basis of the common interests of the proletarian
class must be relegated to the category of millennial dreams. It is
based upon an illusion little better than that of nationalism. The
nationalists seek to escape the moral problem by delegating the vices
of the individual to the group and the Marxians fantastically endow
the group with virtues which it does not possess. Religious and moral
idealism, preaching goodwill and peace without taking the brutal
realities of the modern economic conflict into consideration, is little
better, and probably less serviceable than a cynical realism which is
blind to everything but the secular facts revealed in modern economic
life. The moral futility of such idealism is one of the very roots of
such a cynicism. Yet, finally, the problem of social reconstruction
cannot be solved without the resources of religious insight and moral
goodwill. The economic reorganization of society will not be effected
without conflict between those who possess the privileges and those who
suffer from the inequalities of modern industrialism. Neither can it be
effected without the mutual sacrifice of rights, the mutual forgiveness
of sins and a mutual trust going beyond the deserts of any party to
the controversy. In England, where economic theory and practice has
never been as completely divorced from religious idealism as on the
Continent, a gradual transfer political power and social privilege to
the ranks of the workers is being made with much less peril of a social
convulsion than in any nation of the Continent. Both the possessors of
privilege and those who challenge the possession are stubborn in the
defense of their advantages and in the championship of their rights;
but at least a measure of influence upon the struggle is exercised by
spiritual and moral considerations which Continental critics of England
identify with the British capacity for compromise but which probably
has deeper and more spiritual roots. Meanwhile religious idealism in
America is almost completely corrupted by sentimentality and betrayed
into social futility because the momentary unification of American
society upon the basis of the interests of the middle classes absolves
the religious conscience from facing the moral challenge in the social
and economic facts of modern society.

Economic determinists are not alone in sharing with an ordinary
prudential statecraft in the effort to organize the life of groups
by means of the resources of intelligence. The hopes of the more
conventional yet socially intelligent people for a new world are
involved in the idea of a society or league of nations. Since an
inchoate international society created by the new intimacy in which
nations live exists in spite of international anarchy, it is reasonable
to attempt the creation of more adequate forms and machinery for the
crystallization and expression of its collective will, the conciliation
of disputes among its members and the closer integration of its life.
Moral and spiritual forces are sometimes frustrated merely by the
lack of adequate machinery for the application of generally accepted
principles to specific situations. There is therefore great need for an
intelligent statesmanship which will give the soul of an international
society a body, and incarnate its aspirations in the instruments of
political order.

From another point of view, however, international society does not yet
exist and needs to be created; and the means for its creation are not
laws but attitudes, not organization but a type of life. Politically
minded people easily suffer from the illusion that laws create
morality, that organization creates society. Societies are not created
by political mechanism but by attitudes of mutual respect and trust.
Where these exist social relations are established and traditions
formed. These in turn are gradually codified and given definition and
precision by legal enactments. No one now takes the theory seriously
that human society was created by a conscious mutual contract between
individuals who suddenly realized that they could save themselves in
no other way from mutual self-destruction. Society is older than human
history and exists wherever individuals establish relations of mutual
reverence and trust. The family is usually the beginning of society
because here nature aids the imagination and consanguinity creates an
atmosphere of mutual trust. The family is enlarged by the fortunes
and the needs of war, the resulting clans may amalgamate into larger
units through intermarriage of leaders or through other exigencies,
and the emerging national or racial group is formed by similar forces.
The love and trust which unite a society are no more rational than the
hatred and mistrust which divide one society from another. People do
not regard each other as morally dependable because reason persuades or
experience prompts them to such an attitude. The attitude is determined
by natural and instinctive or by ideal and religious forces and, once
it is assumed, is inevitably verified; for in an atmosphere of mutual
trust human action finally becomes trustworthy and morally dependable.
In so far as national and racial groups live in a state of mutual fear
and hold life outside of the group in contempt rather than in reverence
there is no international society nor can political machinery create
it. Only in rare instances are new social traditions created by legal
enactments. Political forms and legal measures are usually belated
recognitions of previously established social facts and necessities.
The problem of group relations in modern society is as difficult as it
is because natural causes have operated to make the social units larger
and larger while no ideal forces have been strong enough to prompt the
group to enter into ethical relations with other groups. If a higher
degree of imagination than now seems probable does not inform the life
of modern nations only, one further step is possible—the consolidation
of continents. In such an eventuality the present League of Nations
could easily become the instrument of pan-Europeanism in conflict with
other Continents. A society of nations is impossible, in short, without
those ultra-rational attitudes which either instinct or religion must
create and which in the case of this final venture is beyond the
resources of natural instincts—except in the event of a threat from
some other planetary community.

If the creation of an international society is a task to which
moral and spiritual resources must contribute, its maintenance and
development are no less dependent upon the coöperation of spiritual
insight with political prudence. Even at best human nature is so
imperfect and relations between groups as well as individuals so
fruitful in misunderstandings that it is impossible to maintain the
mutual trust and confidence which are the basis of society without
the spiritual achievement of mutual repentance and forgiveness. In
the relation between groups the ability to detect flaws in one’s own
and extenuating circumstances in the actions and attitudes of others
is at once more necessary and more difficult than in intra-group
relations. It is more difficult because the intricacy and long range
of the relations, and the inevitable hypocrisy in the pretensions of
governments, easily obscure the limitations of one and the virtues
and good intentions of the other party of the relationship. It is
more necessary because the frictions which fret the relations of
national and other groups are much more generally due to mutual guilt
than those of individual relations. They develop in a narrow world
and in a society of but few members in which a suspected peril may
lead to a gesture of defense, the defensive measure be regarded as
offensive and in turn prompt an actual attack which will be justified
in turn as a defensive measure. Thus fears produce hatreds, hatreds
express themselves in ugly grimaces and someone finally strikes the
first blow. The World War resulted from a spontaneous combustion of
fears and hatreds, and the partial mobilizations, full mobilizations
and final declarations of war are so intimately related to each
other that impartial historians find it increasingly difficult and
irrelevant to decide who was responsible for the actual hostilities.
The obvious fact is that every generation of every European state for
several centuries had gathered fuel for flames of war. Yet each group
declared its absolute innocence and heaped abuse upon the foe. Years
after the conflict only a small minority in each of the participating
nations has had the imagination to see or the grace to confess the
share of its nation in the mutual guilt. Meanwhile ancient feuds are
perpetuated because the hypocrisy of the victors is written into
solemn treaties and produces a resentment among the vanquished which
makes them incapable of any higher sincerity. Issues between nations
are so involved that only expert knowledge is able to ascertain the
real facts, but the very intricacies of the problems involved make
it possible to use the facts for the validation of almost any thesis
which national pride may dictate. The real task of persuading groups
to encourage forgiveness by repentance and repentance by forgiveness,
and thus to overcome rather than perpetuate evil, is a spiritual
and a moral one and cannot be accomplished in a completely secular
atmosphere. There is little evidence to justify the hope that spiritual
and moral forces, as they are now oriented, are prepared to aid in such
a task. But their responsibility is obvious; social intelligence may
be a partner in the process of conciliation but intelligence cannot
bear the burden alone when a disposition to humility and a capacity for
mercy is lacking.

Urging the necessity of religious attitudes between social and
political groups may seem to be a counsel of perfection when it is
remembered that intra-group relations, except in the circle of the
family and in small religious fellowships, have never been able to
profit by their aid. Society in general has usually contented itself
with the expedient of composing social friction and arbitrating dispute
by apportioning the relative guilt and innocence of the disputants
through a presumably impartial judicatory which enforces its decisions
upon the belligerents, however irreconcilable or obstreperous they
may be. But the fact is that such a method is both easier and more
effective in a society composed of individuals than in a society
of groups. In an ordinary national society the impartiality of the
court is guaranteed by a society of thousands and even millions of
individuals who are supposed not to be biased in favor of one or the
other litigants; and the parties to a controversy are therefore more
inclined to accept the verdict of a court. Furthermore the society
which supports the judicial tribunal is so powerful compared to
whatever political or physical strength the litigants possess that
it is able to enforce the awards of the latter however recalcitrant
the disputants may be. But the society of nations is too small,
judged by the number of its member nations, to function with absolute
impartiality in any major dispute. Judicial action is therefore
immediately less effective. It is to be noted that courts are less
serviceable instruments of social conciliation even within nations
when they deal with large economic and social groups such as unions
and trusts or when the issue involves basic economic problems; and the
reason for this is that the parties to a litigation represent so large
a part of the total community that the unbiased character of the court
is not as readily assumed and ought not be taken for granted. Tradition
and social custom usually bias the court in favor of one or the other
litigants, generally the one most firmly established in the traditional
organization of the society. In the case of nations it is obvious that
for some time to come an international court must confine itself mainly
to petty disputes among powerful nations and to the real disputes
of the petty nations, from whose perspective the large nations may
represent an impartial international society.[16] Even at best no
formal conciliation can heal wounds such as were made by the World War
if nations cannot develop the capacity for repentance and mercy and
learn how to restrain both the proud and the vindictive passions which
are the natural products of unreflective social life.

Though morally dependable action develops most readily in an atmosphere
of mutual trust, it is not to be assumed that either nations or
individuals always justify trust by trustworthy action. Faith does not
produce conscience automatically. Much of the pacifism now cultivated
by socially effective religious forces has the defect that it fails
to gauge the stubborn resistance to ideal forces in the predatory
nature of national groups. It is difficult to develop moral attitudes
sufficiently honest not only to give the bearer of trust the prestige
of sincerity but to make the object of trust worthy of its faith. Trust
united with selfishness results in moral futility; and when it is
based upon illusion and fails to take account of the imperfect social
attitudes which it must overcome, it issues in mere sentimentality. It
is significant that the idea of the outlawry of war should be espoused
particularly in America and find little favor in other nations; for
here extraordinary power is united with remarkable political naïvete,
so that American idealists find it difficult to appreciate the
unsatisfied hungers of other nations or their resentful reaction to our
own satiety. If nations cannot be moved to make some sacrifices for
the sake of the ideal and to qualify their expansive desires by moral
purpose, all efforts to create an international society must finally
prove vain. It may be that the secular ambitions of nations are so
firmly established in social custom and their unethical attitudes so
generally sanctioned by the popular mind that nothing will avail to
give their actions even a touch of ethical character. It is difficult
enough to subdue and discipline the immediate and anarchic desires
which struggle for expression in the soul of the individual; but when
they express themselves in the life of groups and are veiled in seeming
sanctities even while they achieve new and more diabolical forms they
can be subdued only by the most astute intelligence united with a high
moral passion. Modern civilization lacks both this intelligence and
this moral passion and is in the peril of losing what it has of the
latter as it develops the former. Moral idealism which fails to gauge
the measure of resistance which its ideals must meet in the confused
realities of life or to fashion adequate weapons for its conflict
degenerates into mere sentimentality. But a social intelligence which
is overwhelmed by the discouraging realities and despairs of the
attainment of any ideal sinks into a morally enervating cynicism. Moral
leadership in Western society is divided to-day between sentimentalists
and cynics who combine to render the prospect of an ethical
regeneration of modern life well-nigh hopeless. If men are really to be
redeemed from the sins of greed and mutual fears and hatreds by which
they make their common life intolerable they need a faith which is not
held too cheaply but which is held nevertheless in defiance of every
discouragement. The same intelligence which the complexities of modern
life demand and create easily prompts not only to the cynicism which
declares that “all men are liars” but to a moral ennui which cries,
“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

Benjamin Kidd who understood the need for ultra-rational sanctions in
social life better than most sociologists put the problem of modern
society in these words: “The great problem with which every progressive
society stands confronted is: How to retain the highest operative
ultra-rational sanctions for those onerous conditions of life which are
essential to its life, and at one and the same time to allow freest
play to those intellectual forces which, while tending to come into
conflict with such sanctions, contribute nevertheless to raise to the
highest degree of social efficiency the whole of its members.”[17]

To develop the wisdom of serpents while they retain the guilelessness
of doves is the task which faces the religio-moral forces if they
would aid in the moral regeneration of society. It may be that such
a task is too difficult for the resources of this or any generation
of the immediate future and that painful experience must first prove
other strategies inadequate. Meanwhile even the possibility of
future usefulness of religion demands the largest possible measure
of immediate detachment from the unethical characteristics of modern
society. If religion cannot transform society, it must find its social
function in criticizing present realities from some ideal perspective
and in presenting the ideal without corruption, so that it may sharpen
the conscience and strengthen the faith of each generation.




                              CHAPTER VII

                TRANSCENDING AND TRANSFORMING THE WORLD


The tendency of modern religion to make itself at home in the world and
to enter into intimate relations with civilization is not due solely to
the puritan confidence of victory over life. It is partly due to the
influences of a sentimental and optimistic evaluation of human nature
which came to the modern church through Rousseau and romanticism. It
is also a product of the evolutionary optimism which has characterized
religious thought since ethicists and religionists have learnt to
overcome the melancholy conclusions implicit in the Darwinian theory
and to see the bright side of evolution. Traditional religion is
other-worldly. The modern church prides itself on its bright and happy
worldliness. It is more interested in transforming the natural and
social environment of personality than in persuading the soul to
transcend all circumstances and find its happiness in inner peace. The
modern church regards this mundane interest as its social passion.
But it is also the mark of its slavery to society. Whenever religion
feels completely at home in the world, it is the salt which has lost
its savor. If it sacrifices the strategy of renouncing the world, it
has no strategy by which it may convict the world of sin. A movement
which detaches religion from life to give it perspective and power over
life must on the other hand run the risk of centering the interests
of men on other than social problems. Religion thus faces a dilemma
which is not easily solved. A religion of social amelioration easily
becomes a beautiful romance which obscures the unlovely realities of
life. A religion of detachment from the world may persuade the soul
to find both happiness and virtue in defiance of physical and social
circumstances and thus to regard all social problems as irrelevant to
its main purpose. This dilemma is not due to any specific or historic
weaknesses in types of religion but arises out of the nature and
constitution of religion as such.

Religion in its unspoiled form is always other-worldly and
disenchanted. Puritanism, romanticism and evolutionary optimism are
really but reflections and refractions of the general temper of Western
life, which has slowly gained the ascendancy over the religious
spirit. It is a temper of friendliness to, or at least fearlessness
before the world. In puritanism the tension between religion and life
is maintained, but the soul is persuaded that it can bring the whole
of life under the dominion of conscience. In romanticism there is a
frank identification of human virtue with a sentimentally idealized
natural world. Religious and ethical thought which has come under the
influence of evolutionary optimism maintains a sense of tension between
the soul and the natural world in rare instances; more frequently it
regards human history as but the last chapter in the beautiful story
of progress which all life has unfolded and which time and patience
will inevitably bring to a happy issue. The foundation for the Western
strategy of life was laid by the Greeks who, overcoming the awe and
reverence with which the Oriental brooded over nature’s mysteries,
thrust impious hands into her secrets and made shrewd guesses about
her varied phenomena. The Greeks learned to make only slight practical
application of their knowledge, and the rise of Christianity eclipsed
their scientific temper. It came into its own again at the close of the
Middle Ages and at the dawn of the modern era. The fact that science
developed in the West rather than the East is due to this attitude
toward the natural world. The Orient is not less curious than the
Occident, but it directs its mind to other problems. While it cradles
philosophies and religions the West gives birth to science.

Since the dawn of the industrial era scientific knowledge is used
increasingly for the purpose of transforming the natural circumstance
of human life. Nature is not transcended but transformed in the
interest of human happiness. Comforts are multiplied; power is
increased; time and distance are destroyed; hours of toil are reduced;
natural environment is changed; disease is eliminated and death
postponed; the hostilities of nature are overcome and her benevolence
multiplied for the sake of human welfare. Our birth may be “but a
sleep and a forgetting” but our life is undeniably lived in natural
conditions which profoundly affect not only physical well-being but
cultural and spiritual character. It is evident therefore that there
is profound wisdom in the scientific strategy which transforms the
natural world in the interest of the human spirit. Not only is the
Western world firmly committed to it, but there are indications that
the Orient will adopt it in spite of the opposition of religious
leaders such as Gandhi. Whatever perils to the spiritual life may lurk
in the preoccupation of the soul with its physical circumstances, it
is clear that human personality may be served by improving the natural
environment which conditions it. Wealth may lead to sensual excess but
it is also the basis of culture. Leisure may be secured by reducing
physical wants to a minimum, but there are cultural advantages in a
leisure which does not preclude the satisfaction of all reasonable
desires. Comforts may lead men to become obsessed with their external
circumstances, but they also reduce irrelevant distractions to life’s
main purpose. Physical health is not a necessary but a convenient
condition for moral and spiritual enterprise.

In spite of these advantages religion, except in a few contemporary
forms, has always been either hostile or indifferent to the business
of transforming nature in the interest of personal values. It has
counseled the soul to seek its happiness not in changing but in
becoming independent of circumstances. In Buddhism the highest
happiness is sought by throttling all desires. Jesus was more careful
to distinguish between the will to live and its physical expressions.
But he was critical of all physical desires and satisfactions. He had
the Orient’s profound indifference to the “business of earth.” If
our ears were not so habituated to his words that they fail to catch
their real significance, a modern congregation would be shocked by
the admonition: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or
what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is
not life more than meat and the body more than raiment?” “Lay not up
for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt
and where thieves break through and steal, for where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also.” “Fear not them which kill the
body but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is
able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The modern Christian is
inclined to destroy the force of the profound other-worldliness of such
sentiments by reflecting that they represent an Oriental cast which is
incidental and not essential to the gospel of Jesus. They are Oriental
no doubt, but precisely because they are religious; and to regard them
as incidental is to miss the whole meaning of the gospel. Though the
West is unable to accept them, it pays an unconscious tribute to the
truth involved in them. For the absolute moral values incarnated in the
personality of Jesus, which the West still reveres, are organically
related to this other-worldliness.

Whatever the limitations of this emphasis, it is evident that religion
cannot escape it. Concerned with the soul’s inner peace and perfect
virtue it is forced to lift it above the corruptions and irrelevancies
of temporal conditions. The whole course of modern history is ample
justification for Jesus’ warning: Where your treasure is, there will
your heart be also. The instruments of personality’s victory over
nature have become the chains for a new kind of thraldom. Western
civilization is enslaved to its machines and the things which the
machines produce. Spiritual forces are emancipated from the forces of
nature only to become the victims of a mechanized civilization. It is
a Pyrrhic victory. America, which has developed the Western strategy
with greater consistency than any other nation, is at once the envy and
the scorn of the world. The scorn may be a device for hiding the envy,
but there is moral justification for reproach. What the world regards
as our vulgarity is more than the awkwardness of youth; it is an undue
preoccupation with life’s instrumentality and an obsession of the soul
with the concrete world.

The Orient may be more cruel than the West, but our superior tenderness
is matched by our more expansive avarice. Having determined that
life consists in things a man possesses, the West sacrifices both
inner peace and social harmony in the mad scramble for the power and
privilege which the conquests of nature has supplied. Neither the
imperialism of nations nor the monstrous avarice of economic groups
is confined to Western life, but covetousness and greed have been
manifestly increased by the temper and strategy of the Occident. The
Biblical analysis which discovers covetousness as the root of conflict
is applicable to our own day: “Ye lust and have not; ye kill and
desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not
because ye ask amiss.... Know ye not that the friendship of this world
is enmity with God?”[18] However necessary it may be to make a more
equitable distribution of the physical blessings of life, religion’s
true function is to develop an attitude of indifference toward the
very goods for the possession of which men contend so frantically.
When Jesus rebuked the young man who desired his aid in correcting the
inequitable division of an inheritance, his unwillingness to assume
a judicial function was manifestly dictated by the thought that the
whole inheritance ought to have been a matter of indifference to the
young man. It is easy to see that such an attitude may lend itself to
abuse and be used to perpetuate inequalities. If advocated by religious
groups which have profited by economic inequalities, it becomes the
tool of hypocrisy. Yet it is an emphasis which religion cannot disavow.
It is basic to its whole world view.

The peril to happiness as well as to virtue in reliance upon the
external fortunes of life justifies the counsel of religion that
happiness must be founded on internal rather than external resources.
The conquest of nature is really but a relative victory of personality
over circumstance. Though the caprice of nature’s forces has been
checked, fortune remains fickle. If men cannot learn “how to be
abased and how to abound,” there is no guarantee of happiness for
them. Poverty may be a curse, but voluntarily chosen or consented to
without sullenness it may become the way of the soul’s emancipation.
The elimination of disease is a boon to mankind, but there is little
likelihood that science will be able to overcome all ills to which the
human flesh is heir. No scientific advance will obviate the necessity
for the discovery of faith that “God’s strength is made perfect in
weakness,” that the infirmities of the flesh may become the occasion
for the cultivation of spiritual graces. Even at best science cannot
destroy nature’s final irrelevancy—death. There can therefore be
no real victory over nature except by the strategy of transcending
her fortunes. The more hostages taken from her the greater will be
the disappointment in the hour of her final victory. It is man’s
sublime and tragic fate that he must find happiness in the search for
infinitude amidst the flux of time and he can therefore never accept
the portion of mortality for himself with equanimity. Hence his final
comfort must come from the counsel of religion which teaches him how he
may identify himself with the eternal values of his devotion, so that
“though the outward man perish yet the inward man is renewed day by
day.”[19]

The temper of Western civilization has made the modern church quite
ashamed of the other-worldly character of traditional religion, and
intent upon discarding it as much as possible. Everything is done
to impress the generation with the mundane interests of religious
idealism and to secularize religion itself so that it may survive
in a secular age as a kind of harmless adornment of the moral life.
Yet its service to both human happiness and virtue are involved in
its other-worldliness. It is through that element that it gains the
power to raise morality above the utilitarian plane and to give human
happiness a firmer foundation than fickle fortune. If men can find no
basis for happiness except in their adjustment to external realities,
they will not suffer pain to realize a kingdom of righteousness. If
they are taught to identify physical well-being with their cherished
peace, they will not venture farther than such actions as a cool
prudence prompts. The cross was inspired by devotion to a “kingdom
which is not of this world”; but the cross was also the method by which
that kingdom was changed from an ethereal to a concrete reality. It
is the absolute ideal which has no basis in concrete reality which
moves men to defy the limitations of the concrete and overcome them. A
religion which is perfectly at home in the world has no counsel for it
which the world could not gain by an easier method.

Yet the reaction of modern religion to traditional other-worldliness is
natural enough and, in a way, necessary. While religion cannot afford
to discard its other-worldliness, the moral and social limitations
which issue from it are obvious enough. We have previously observed
the tendency of types of religion to withdraw the ideal from life
and to imagine that it has magic potencies over life’s realities,
or that subjective devotion to it may absolve them of the duty of
realizing it in history. All these defects are due to vagaries
which are not inevitable characteristics of religious life. But
the social limitations which result from the religious strategy of
transcending the fortunes of life are constitutional and central. They
therefore offer a very serious problem. If the soul is lifted above
circumstances, it easily loses interest in changing them to better
advantage. If its happiness is made independent of fortune, there
is less purpose in making fortune secure. If personality discovers
its highest satisfactions in defying environmental factors, it may
become indifferent to the necessary projects of creating a more
favorable environment for personal values. Human personality is an
historic product, determined by specific forces of natural and social
environment, and though it may attain its highest glory by transcending
all circumstances, it will fall short if it adopts that strategy at
the beginning and not at the end of its efforts. The Orient, which
produces more saints than the Occident, pays for them by the abject
misery of its multitudes. Its highest moral achievements are really
determined by a cruel law of survival. Only personalities of great
spiritual resource can overcome the general physical conditions of its
life which submerge the mass in hopeless poverty.

Some credit for the advantages of Western life must be given to the
moral superiority of Christianity over Buddhism, which represents the
quintessence of the Oriental spirit. Christianity is a life-affirming
and Buddhism a life-denying faith. The one does not destroy but
refines the energy of life. The other destroys energy in the process
of refinement. The Orient is pantheistic; and by deifying all of
life, offers no avenue of escape from its imperfections except by
annihilation of life itself. There is a difference between fleeing to
God from life’s unbearable realities and identifying these with the
divine will. At its worst the strategy of the Orient is a fatalistic
acceptance of life’s circumstances; at its best it is a stifling of
all desires so that the soul may be free of the world. Yet there is
a social peril even in the more wholesome strategy of Christianity
which affirms life but divorces it from its physical necessities. This
limitation is felt particularly when the conditions which invite change
are social rather than natural. Nature is inexorable and it is well to
learn that only they are able to escape her furies who also know how
to renounce her delights. But the world which man has created retains
its cruelties only by the sufferance of man. Anything which will
incline men to assume an attitude of indifference toward projects of
social reform and amelioration is therefore a potential peril to social
progress. When Jesus rebuked the young man for his anxiety about an
equitable division of his inheritance, he took a high spiritual ground
which easily lends itself to abuse in the disillusioning realities
of economic and social life. What if a sublime renunciation does not
soften the hearts of those who hold more than their just share of the
inheritance? And what if the welfare of others besides that of the
moral idealist is involved in the renunciation? Shall the Biblical
injunction to servants that they be obedient to their masters “not only
to the good and gentle but also to the froward” apply to political
tyrannies? Obviously an attitude which represents a high spiritual
achievement in the individual instance has its limitations when raised
to a general social policy. Social radicals who have been confronted
with the conservatism of religion have parodied the other-worldly
temper at the heart of this characteristic in the words: “Bye and
bye, there’ll be pie in the sky.” The sneer in this parody hardly
does justice to religious other-worldliness. The emphasis is not so
much upon a future life as distinguished from the present existence
as upon a type of life which can afford to regard “pie” with disdain
whether in this or any other world. Nevertheless, even the highest type
of other-worldliness may become the cause of indifference to social
conditions. The very sensitiveness of religion which persuades it to
regard human society in the same category with the world of nature as
“the world” may result in the completer secularization of society and
its abandonment to the unchecked forces of nature.

There is no easy formula for avoiding this social peril in the strategy
of religion. The elimination of pantheism is a material aid in its
solution. The superior energy of the West may be due to a tentative
dualism in its religion which has been qualified from time to time
by pantheistic and monistic thought but never completely destroyed.
Yet even the dualism of Christianity does not save it altogether
from positions which offer peril to social and moral values. Even an
observer who is entirely sympathetic to religion must come to the
conclusion that the West owes many of its advantages to the fact that
religion has had no easy time in Western life, and that in the past
centuries not only scientific thought but scientific life-strategy has
challenged religion at every turn. Some of the excellencies of Western
life are clearly the fruits of our science rather than our religion.
Of course, these advantages have been bought at a price. The empirical
instincts of science drive it to deny the continuities in reality and
to see everything only in its momentary and immediate situation. The
modern behavioristic destruction of the concept of personality is
therefore one of the natural results of scientific thought betrayed
into absurdity by its own consistency. But a consistent religion is
generally equally absurd. Regarding all reality, and personality
in particular, _sub specie æternitatis_, it fails to see how truly
personality is the product of specific social and natural forces and
neglects to change the material environment in the interest of human
welfare. Human personality can be understood neither in terms of its
environment alone nor in absolute terms which leave the material world
in which it develops out of account. The final victory of personality
must be gained by transcending concrete situations and material
circumstances; but it is a hollow victory if circumstances are not
previously used and amended to improve personal values. The soul is
at once the victim and the master of the material world. It gains
its highest triumph by renouncing the world, but the renunciation is
premature if a futile and yet not futile effort is not made to make the
natural world conform to the needs of human character.

While the Western world has much to learn from the East in its strategy
of life, there is no gain in substituting one strategy for the other;
for they are both defective. The plight of the West is due to the
complete bankruptcy of religious forces and the unchallenged dominion
of science; just as the plight of the East is due to the unchallenged
sway of religion. Applied science has created a civilization which may
be as destructive of personality for the meagerly endowed multitudes
as the natural poverty of Asia. But Western civilization may at least
boast of developing a middle class which enjoys physical and spiritual
advantages which no considerable class of the Orient possesses. Neither
the West nor the East has arrived at a perfect basis for happiness. The
Oriental soul is like a bird, freed of its cage, but with no wings to
fly. The Occidental soul has wings but is so fascinated by its gilded
cage that it does not care to fly.

The conclusion which emerges from such reflections will shock orthodox
religionists. It is that the values of religion are conditioned and not
absolute and that they attain their highest usefulness not when they
subdue all other values but when they are in perpetual conflict with
them, or it may be truer to say when they are coördinated with them.
Western life gained an advantage over the East by centuries of conflict
between the religious and scientific strategy of life. It is losing the
advantage by an excessive devotion to concrete interests and by the
capitulation of religion. The supreme tragedy of history would be the
not improbable armed conflict between West and East, with the Orient
in a frenzy of resentment against the greed of the Occident and the
Occident in a natural fear of the low living standards of Asia. Part of
the truth would be on either side and the conflict could result only
in exaggerating the limitations of the partial truth which each side
holds.

Meanwhile there is the possibility of coördinating the values of East
and West, of science and religion. Let the East learn to live in
time and the West to view its temporalities with indifference. The
coördination is not easy because men are not inclined to be at once
critical and appreciative of the values with which they must deal.
They always tend to increase the limitations of certain values by an
uncritical devotion, or to destroy the values in mad resentment against
their limitations. Since man is a citizen of two worlds, he cannot
afford to renounce his citizenship in either. He must work out his
destiny both as a child of nature and as a servant of the absolute.

The prospects for an exchange of values between the East and the West
are not particularly bright. The Orient is indeed being “Americanized,”
but partly through the policy of Western imperialism exploiting the
low living standards of Asia to the advantage of Western industry.
There is no powerful movement in the West to dissuade it from its
complete trust in physical power as the method of self-realization, and
in physical comfort as the way to happiness. Modern religion has not
been totally ineffective in qualifying racial arrogance and parochial
prejudices. But it has had practically no effect upon the instincts of
avarice which dominate Western life. The religious groups which are
still ambitious to defy civilization in the name of their faith have
a theology which cannot gain the respect of the thoughtful leaders of
modern life; and the sins of which they convict modern society are not
its real sins. The intellectually emancipated religious groups are too
thoroughly acclimatized to the atmosphere of Western life to have any
sensitiveness for its imperfections.

The greatest hope lies in the missionary enterprise, which through its
very effort toward the universalization of the Christian faith has
a tendency to strip it of its Occidental accretions, so that it may
become intrinsically worthy of its world expansion. The missionary
enterprise may thereby contribute as much toward the spiritualization
of Western life as toward the regeneration of the East. Its very
contact with the East gives it a perspective on the limitations of
Western life which churches at home do not possess. There is, of
course, the possibility that Western imperialism will so thoroughly
discredit the missionary enterprise before it can function in this
way that it will lose its whole prestige in the Eastern world. In
that case Japan will probably continue to unify and occidentalize
Asia in the hope of fighting fire with fire. A small minority of
thoughtful missionaries are making a desperate effort to disassociate
the missionary enterprise from the politics of Western imperialism in
the Orient. Considering the difficulty of their task, they have made
commendable progress. Yet if Christianity at home does not become
disassociated from and does not qualify the greed of which the Oriental
politics of Western nations is but one expression, the heroic efforts
of the missionaries may be vain. Men of prudence in the Orient may be
willing to concede that ideals have validity even if they are outraged
by those who ostensibly accept them. But the final test of ideals must
include their ability to qualify human action. If Christian idealism
is to be a force which will help to create a unified world culture,
capable of destroying the moral limitations of both the Oriental and
the Occidental strategy of life, it must detach itself more completely
from the temper of Western life even while it seeks to influence the
thought of the East.




                              CHAPTER VIII

             A PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS FOR AN ETHICAL RELIGION


The ethical problem of religion may be more important than the
metaphysical one, as previously observed, but it cannot be solved
without a reorientation of the present philosophical basis of religious
conviction. The Western world has had a slight advantage over the
East in the tentative dualism of Christianity, but this advantage
has been lost by the inevitable drift toward pantheism in Western
thought. Pantheistic tendencies are potential perils to moral values
in practically all religions. By identifying God and the natural world
they either persuade men to resign themselves to the inadequacies of
nature, under the illusion that divine sanctity has rendered them
immutable, or they blind the eye to the imperfections of nature and
thus destroy the moral sensitiveness of religion. The Orient has
usually derived a morally enervating pessimism from its pantheism,
while the Occident has chosen the other horn of the monistic dilemma
and fallen into a sentimental optimism. Both alternatives are as untrue
to the facts as they are inadequate to men’s moral needs.

In the Western world religious optimism has been gradually destroyed
by the advance of science which discredited the moral overestimate of
the cosmic order, implicit as one of two tendencies in pantheism. The
practical and tragic realities of its international and industrial life
have added to the disillusionment and made men as sceptical of human as
of cosmic virtue. Thus the cynicism of disillusioned intelligence is
added to the despair of an outraged conscience to unite in a pessimism
which questions both the rationality of the universe and the morality
of man. The despair of the West is even more devastating to moral
values than the pessimism of the East, for the Orient is prompted by
its religion to a serene resignation while the West spends itself in
blind fury or sensual excess. When all confidence in moral values is
destroyed, the strong express themselves by asserting their power or
resenting their seeming impotence, while the weak sink into an easy
indulgence of natural appetites. The real history of Western society
is being written by Nietzschian and Marxian cynics who have subdued
every scruple which might qualify their contest for power. Meanwhile
their conflict is lazily witnessed by vast hordes whose main purpose
in life is to gratify their senses and who give their sympathy to one
or the other side according as it offers least hindrance to their
enjoyments. In such a situation religion is easily relegated to the
position of restraining the petty and obscuring the major vices of the
small minority which still profess it. This is particularly true when
optimism and sentimentality, such as characterize modern religion,
make it incapable of a realistic evaluation of the forces which reveal
themselves in human society.

Albert Schweitzer[20] interprets the whole moral bankruptcy of Western
civilization as a pessimistic reaction to the extravagant optimism of
its traditional religions and philosophies. While other factors, such
as the complexity and the impersonal nature of industrial society,
have been contributory factors to the disillusionment of the age, it
is probably true that men are inclined to expect too little of the
world and of man mostly because too much has been claimed for them and
extravagant hopes have been disappointed. A regeneration of the ethical
life of Western society must depend, therefore, upon the revival of a
religion in which the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of pure
naturalism are avoided. While the Orient has a serenity which will
contribute much to the art of living in a unified world civilization,
there is no health for our sickness in its religious philosophies.
Its pantheism cannot be maintained in the scientific atmosphere of
the West, and if it could, as it is in rare instances, it would only
present us with the impossible choice between the moral ennui of
pessimism and the sentimentality of an unqualified optimism. The
youthful exuberance of the Western mind invariably inclines it to
the least defensible of these two bad alternatives, the optimistic
one. When the West borrows religion from the East, as for instance
in theosophy and Christian Science, it is used to support optimistic
illusions so palpably absurd that they flourish only in those circles
of society in which life is extremely comfortable and not too
intelligent.

The only fruitful alternative to a monism and pantheism which
identifies God and the world, the real and the ideal, is a dualism
which maintains some kind of distinction between them and does not
lose one in the other. Dualistic solutions to the riddles of life
are not new in the history of religious thought. They are in fact as
numerous as pantheistic ones, but their metaphysical limitations have
usually outweighed their moral advantages and shortened their life. In
Zoroastrianism, the noblest of purely Aryan faiths, Ahirman the spirit
of evil exists independently of Ormuzd the good spirit. The influence
of this Persian dualism is seen in both Hebrew and Christian thought.
The satanology of the Old Testament is partly derived from it; and
Manichæism, through which Augustine passed before he embraced and
elaborated Catholic orthodoxy, is a compound of Persian and Christian
religion. Mythology is filled with efforts to do justice to the
conflicts which the world reveals as obviously as its unities, as for
instance in the myth of Prometheus and Zeus. Even Plato, from whom most
Western pantheism has been indirectly derived, held that God’s perfect
goodness was thwarted by the intractableness of the materials with
which he worked.

Early Hebrew religion was naïvely dualistic, and that is one reason
why it has been so potent in the history of religion. God was
indeed conceived of as omnipotent; that conception was the path
that led to monotheism. But the idea of omnipotence was elaborated
dramatically rather than philosophically. The heavens might declare
his glory and the firmament show his handiwork, but he was revealed
in national history and (according to the conception of the later
prophets) in personal experience more than in natural phenomena. Even
a very early prophet discovered that the still small voice rather
than the earthquake or the fire was the symbol of his presence.
The Genesis account of the fall solves the problem of evil upon an
essentially monistic basis by making human sin responsible for even
the inadequacies of nature and attributing everything from weeds to
mortality to the luckless error of the first man. Neither the goodness
nor the omnipotence of God is abridged in this naïve but sublime
conception in which the human conscience assumes responsibility for
more than its share of human ills in order to save the reputation of
divine virtue. The monism of this account is, however, qualified by the
injection of the tempting serpent, an element which is precursory of
the belief in the devil, which the Jews inherited from Babylonia and
Persia and which has fortunately qualified all monistic tendencies in
Jewish and Christian orthodoxy until this day. A profounder instinct
than reveals itself to the casual observer persuades fundamentalism
to defend the reality of the devil with such vehemence. It may be
metaphysically inconsistent to have two absolutes, one good and one
evil, but the conception provides at least for a dramatic portrayal of
the conflict which disturbs the harmonies and unities of the universe,
and therefore, it has a practical and ethical value. The idea of
attributing personality to evil may be scientifically absurd but it
rests upon a natural error. When the blind and impersonal forces of
nature come to life in man they are given the semblance of personality.

Professor Albert Schweitzer[21] ascribes the moral superiority of
prophetic Judaism and Christianity over other world religions to the
naïve dualism of the prophets and Jesus, who emphasized the moral
rather than the metaphysical attributes of God in such a way as to
develop a practical and morally potent distinction between God and the
universe, between the ideal of religious devotion and the disappointing
realities of life. The distinction between Oriental monism and the
practical dualism of Christianity in its unspoiled form is succinctly
stated by Professor Alfred Whitehead: “Christianity has always been
a religion seeking a metaphysics in contrast to Buddhism which is a
metaphysics generating a religion.... The defect of a metaphysical
system is the very fact that it is a neat little system which thereby
oversimplifies its expression of the world.... In respect to its
treatment of evil, Christianity is therefore less clear in its
metaphysical idea but more inclusive of the facts.”[22]

In the early Christian church the naïve dualism of Jesus was given
dramatic and dynamic force through his deification, so that he became,
in a sense, the God of the ideal, the symbol of the redemptive force
in life which is in conflict with evil. Since no clear distinction
was made between the spirit of the living Christ and the indwelling
Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the trinity was, in effect, a symbol of
an essential dualism. Orthodox Christianity did indeed renounce the
gnostic heresy which tried to give this implicit dualism explicit
character by its distinction between the God who was revealed in Jesus
and the God of creation. And history has justified the wisdom of its
course. The scientific precision necessary to save such theology
from essential polytheism was lacking and Christianity was intent
upon guarding its monotheism. Yet it preserved enough metaphysical
inconsistency to retain dualistic tendencies in its monistic orthodoxy.
Its symbols lacked philosophical precision but they did give vivid
and dramatic force to the idea of a conflict between evil and the
redemptive and creative force in life. Thus it could fulfill the two
great functions of religion in prompting men to repent of their sins,
and in encouraging them to hope for redemption from them. No mechanical
or magical explanations of the significance of the crucifixion have
ever permanently obscured the helpful spiritual symbolism of the
cross in which the conflict between good and evil is portrayed and
the possibility as well as the difficulty of the triumph of the good
over evil is dramatized. An absolute dualism either between God and
the universe or between man and nature, or spirit and matter, or good
and evil, is neither possible nor necessary. What is important is that
justice be done to the fact that creative purpose meets resistance in
the world and that the ideal which is implicit in every reality is also
in conflict with it. The reason why naïve religions are “more inclusive
of the facts” in portraying this struggle than highly elaborated
theologies is that the latter are always prompted by the rational need
of consistency to obscure some facts for the sake of developing an
intellectual plausible unity. Religions grow out of real experience in
which tragedy mingles with beauty and man learns that the moral values
which dignify his life are embattled in his own soul and imperiled
in the world. He is inclined neither to obscure the reality of the
struggle nor to sacrifice the hope of victory until too much reflection
persuades him to believe either that all partial evil is universal good
or that destiny makes his struggle futile and his defeat inevitable.
That is how morality dies with religion when an age has become too
sophisticated.

Naïve Christianity was unable to maintain itself in the Græco-Roman
world without making concessions to its intellectual scruples and
paying for its conquests by incorporating Hellenic philosophies in its
theology. The gospel was diluted with neo-Platonism to make it more
palatable for a cultured world. The naïvely and dramatically conceived
omnipotence of God was metaphysically elaborated and inevitably
betrayed the church into an essential pantheism, which “turns the
natural world, man’s stamping-ground and system of opportunities,
into a self-justifying and sacred life, endows the blameless giant
with an inhuman soul and worships the monstrous divinity it has
fabricated.”[23] The process of compounding the simplicities of the
gospel with the dialectic achievements of Greek philosophy culminated
in St. Augustine who laid the foundation for Christian orthodoxy and
made the simple Christian epic the basis of an elaborate theological
structure in which God becomes at the same time the guarantee of the
reality of the ideal and the actual cause of every concrete reality.
Christianity has always anathematized pantheism officially, but
probably—as Professor Santayana suggests—because it suspected that
it was a suppressed but not entirely quiescent half of its dogma.
Vital religion has a way of expressing itself outside the limits of
its rationally fixed concepts and the essential pantheism of orthodox
Christianity therefore did not destroy the moral vigor of even such
resolute determinists as Augustine or John Calvin. Yet in the end the
logic of a system of ideas becomes the pattern of human action. A
rigorous determinism as well as an unqualified pantheism destroys moral
vigor because it either makes the attainment of the ideal too certain
or idealizes the real beyond all evidence. If reality only thinly
veils the ideal implicit in it, or if the implicit ideal is certain to
become real in history, there is no occasion for moral adventure and
no reason for moral enthusiasm. In a sense pantheism is naturalism
with an unnatural light upon it. That is why the determinism implied in
pantheism may lead so easily to a reaction of naturalistic determinism.
Thus Karl Marx appropriated Hegel’s determinism and put it to his own
use. When the whole wealth of Hegel’s dialectical skill served no
better purpose than to deify the Prussian military state, as a kind
of ultimate revelation of the counsels of God, it was easy enough to
discredit its optimistic illusions without destroying its determinism.
The residual determinism became the basis of a new philosophy of
history in which natural instinct and economic necessity took the
place of divine will as man’s inexorable fate. The reaction from Hegel
to Marx is a perfect symbol of the whole course of Western thought
in the last hundred years with its change from a supernatural to a
naturalistic determinism.

Religion left to itself, even when it elaborates theologies, tries
to do some justice to the reality of moral conflict even though it
may confuse the issue by a faulty definition of divine omnipotence.
But its necessary coöperation with metaphysics drives it inevitably
into more and more consistent monisms in which moral enthusiasms are
destroyed. The monistic and pantheistic element in Western religion
was greatly increased by its intimate collaboration with philosophies
which dealt chiefly with the problem of knowledge. For the solution
of the epistemological problem the philosophical idealists thought it
necessary to posit an all-knowing intelligence. It was this all-knowing
absolute which became the support of religion’s faith in God against
the attacks of realists and empiricists, though there was little enough
affinity between the God of any healthy religious theism and the
impersonal absolute of monistic philosophers.

When religious apologists found it necessary to readjust the age-old
affirmations of faith to the evolutionary facts revealed by science
they usually sank even more deeply into the morass of pantheistic and
monistic philosophy. The old and naïve conceptions of a capricious
omnipotence working its will upon natural phenomena became manifestly
untenable and a way had to be found to relate divine purpose to and
discover the area of creativity in the natural and cosmic processes. It
was practically inevitable that such a task would be accomplished only
by an overemphasis on divine immanence and a consequent betrayal of
religion into a sentimental optimism. When defenders of religious faith
were borrowing from the quiver of their opponents they would have done
well to consult Thomas Huxley more and Herbert Spencer less; for Huxley
was morally much more realistic than Spencer. Spencerian doctrines lent
themselves more easily to the strategy of linking religious theism
with the faith of science in the dependability of the universe; but
there was something lacking in Spencerian optimism which is very vital
to religion, a sense of the tragic in life and an awareness of the
frustration which moral purpose and creative will must meet in nature
and in man. The sentimentality of modern religion is of course older
than the optimism which it derived from Spencer. Part of it is derived
from Rousseau and the romanticism of the eighteenth century. Here again
religion suffered the fate of snatching error while it was borrowing
truth from its opponents. Renouncing the idea of total depravity which
was central in medieval religion, and in orthodox Protestantism for
that matter, it evolved a sentimental overestimate of human virtue
which is no nearer the truth than the medieval conceptions of original
sin. It is a strange irony in history that to-day irreligion, in
the form of deterministic psychology, should elaborate doctrines
strangely akin to the derogatory estimates of human resources made by
medieval theologians. So modern churches are involved in an optimistic
overestimate of the virtue of both man and nature at the very time
when science tempts men to despair of discovering moral integrity in
the one and moral meaning in the other. Modern religion is, in short,
not sufficiently modern. In it eighteenth-century sentimentality and
nineteenth-century individualism are still claiming victory over the
ethical and religious prejudices of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile life
has moved on and the practical needs of modern society demand an ethic
which is not individualistic and a religion which is not unqualifiedly
optimistic.

The practical effects of this lack of contact of modern religion
with the real temper of modern life may be gauged by comparing the
observations of any average denominational journal of religion upon the
events of contemporary history with the realistic analyses of secular
journals. The brutalities of the economic conflict, the disillusioning
realities of international relations, the monstrous avarice of nations
and the arrogance of races, all these sins with which the life of
modern society is cursed are treated with an easy complacency by
religious observers which contrasts strangely with the frantic anxiety
of secular idealists. In a recent world conference of the churches
at Stockholm members of the German delegation objected to what they
regarded as an identification of the Kingdom of God with the League of
Nations made by a good bishop in the opening sermon. National prejudice
may have prompted this criticism but the superior perspective lent by
bitter experience gave it a measure of justification, and it would be
applicable to other sermonic interpretations of current history besides
those of the bishop.

The war itself was a disheartening revelation of the moral obfuscation
of modern religion when dealing with the tragedies of history. The
easy partnership of religious sentiment with patriotic fervor has been
previously ascribed to the natural relation between religion and any
devotion to an ethical ideal, however imperfect. There is, however,
yet another reason for the blindness of religious idealists to the
horrors of war. The monistic orientation of modern religion made it
necessary for the church to save religious faith by discovering the
saving virtues in the great evil. It was therefore unable to view the
realities in proper proportion. For a realistic interpretation of the
great tragedy modern society had to depend upon secular idealists who
did not feel called upon to save either God’s or man’s reputation.

Sentimentality is a poor weapon against cynicism, and idealistic
determinism has no way of defeating determinism of the naturalistic
type. Since both the latter represent reactions to the former, they
can be overcome only by bringing these into closer conformity with the
facts. The freedom and moral integrity of man is not an illusion but
it is a fact very seriously circumscribed. Transcendent purpose and
creative will in the universe may be scientifically validated but do
not thereby become the effective cause of every natural phenomenon.
What is needed is a philosophy and a religion which will do justice
both to the purpose and to the frustration which purpose meets in the
inertia of the concrete world, both to the ideal which fashions the
real and to the real which defeats the ideal, both to the essential
harmony and to the inevitable conflict in the cosmos and in the soul.
In a sense there is not a single dualism in life; rather there are
many of them. In his own life man may experience a conflict between
his moral will and the anarchic desires with which nature has endowed
him; or he may experience a conflict between his cherished values and
the caprices of nature which know nothing of the economy of values in
human life. In the cosmic order the conflict is between creativity and
the resistance which frustrates creative purpose. Whether the dualism
is defined as one of mind and matter, or thought and extension, or
force and inertia, or God and the devil, it approximates the real facts
of life. It may be impossible to do full justice to the two types of
facts by any set of symbols or definitions; but life gives the lie to
any attempt by which one is explained completely in terms of the other.
There is no more reason to-day to deny the reality of God than to
explain every casual phenomenon in terms of his omnipotent will.

Our interest is in the moral fruits of religious and philosophical
ideas rather than in their perfect consistency, but it may be noted in
passing that philosophically competent scientists and scientifically
competent philosophers arrive at conclusions to-day which are in
closer accord with a naïve theism than with the monism of absolute
idealism. They do not of course picture a God who is outside of the
world and at work upon it as a potter upon his clay; but they do
justice to both the purpose and the limitation of purpose in the
creative process. Professor Hobhouse writes: “The evolutionary process
can best be understood as the effect of a purpose slowly working
itself out under limiting conditions which it brings successively
under control.... This would mean not that reality is spiritual or the
creation of an unconditioned mind ... but that there is a spiritual
element integral to the structure and movement of reality and that
evolution is the process by which this principle makes itself master
of the residual conditions which at first dominate its life and thwart
its efforts.”[24] It may be a natural overbelief and an inevitable
anthropomorphism if religion attributes all the characteristics of
personality to the purpose, “the spiritual element integral to the
structure and movement of reality.” But if a place for freedom and
purpose in the cosmic order, however conditioned, is discovered the
essential affirmation of religious faith is metaphysically verified.
The values of personality are related to cosmic facts. Professor Alfred
Whitehead defines God as that in reality which is not concrete but the
principle of every concrete actuality. He makes the telling observation
that while a dynamic view of reality may dispense with God as the prime
mover it must substitute for Aristotle’s prime mover a principle of
limitation and concretion, since the dynamic nature of reality does
not account for the various forms in which it is made concrete.[25]
In other words the faith of religion in both the transcendence
and immanence of God is given a new metaphysical validation. His
unchangeableness is “his self-consistency in relation to all change”;
but this does not justify the deterministic conclusion of a “complete
self-consistency of the temporal world.” The reality of God and the
reality of evil as a positive force are thus both accepted.

There is, in short, no reason why religion should not hold to its
faith in God without either identifying him with or losing him in the
concrete world. The moral and spiritual values in which religion is
interested have a basis in concrete actuality. They are on the one hand
not a mere effervescence on the surface of the concrete, and on the
other hand they are not the only basis of historical realities. The
pluralism of William James, which has been criticized as scientifically
inaccurate and metaphysically inconsistent, seems to have both
scientific and metaphysical virtues. There is good reason to accept at
least a qualified dualism not only because it is morally more potent
than traditional monisms, but because it is metaphysically acceptable.
It is not to be expected that science will ever invest the concept
of God with the attributes which religious devotion assigns to it.
But there is no reason why religious and moral experience should not
build further upon the foundation laid by science. It is manifestly
necessary to have some metaphysical basis for religious conviction, for
there is no spiritual vigor in the conscious self-deception of purely
subjective religions. But it is not necessary to limit religion to
the bare concepts which science establishes. It is in fact better for
religion to forego perfect metaphysical consistency for the sake of
moral potency. In a sense religion is always forced to choose between
an adequate metaphysics and an adequate ethics. That is not to say that
the two interests are incompatible but that they are not identical.
When there is a conflict between them it is better to leave the
metaphysical problem with some loose ends than to develop a religion
which is inimical to moral values. The reason why naïve religions have
frequently been morally more potent than highly rationalized ones is
not because the faith which gave them moral fervor was necessarily
inconsistent with the facts, but because they based their affirmations
upon facts and experiences which were inconsistent with each other
or seemed to be but were equally true and equally necessary for the
maintenance of moral and spiritual energy.

The objection to religious dualism comes not only from those who
subordinate all advantages to that of rational consistency but also
from those who believe that it imperils purely religious values. It
robs God of omnipotence (so the argument runs) and the universe of
dependability. It gives no certain guarantee of the triumph of personal
and spiritual values. It may put a note of challenge in religion,
but it also destroys its comforting assurances. The answer to such
a criticism is that the moral virtues of dualism are derived from
precisely that characteristic. It is not easy to challenge to conflict
and to guarantee victory at one and the same time. By dignifying
personality religion runs the peril of obscuring the defects of human
nature; if it makes the triumph of righteousness certain, it may
incline men to take “moral holidays.” Too much emphasis upon the
harmonies of the universe may make evil seem unreal. If men are given
the opportunity, they will extract comfort from religion and forget the
challenge implied in its faith; which simply means that they will use
religion to sublimate rather than to qualify their will to live. They
will accept the assurance of faith that the frustrations of the natural
world are not permanent, but they will not accept the challenge of
faith to overcome the corruptions of nature in their own souls.

The perennial conflict between priest and prophet is given in the
double function of religion. The priest dispenses comfort and the
prophet makes the challenge of religion potent. The priest is more
numerous than the prophet because human selfishness is as determining
in religion as in other fields. Though the priest always defeats
the prophet in the end, the prophet is avenged because his original
experience is the reality which makes the priest’s assurance plausible.
There is no way of guaranteeing the reality of God if someone does
not make him real in experience, and there is no way of declaring
the victory of the ideal if someone does not defeat reality in the
name of the ideal in history. Religion validates itself in spiritual
experience and moral triumph. Speculation and deduction contribute to
religious certainty only after experience has laid the foundation for
faith. It is not possible to free religion altogether of its priestly
corruptions. But anything which will make it more difficult to accept
the comforts of faith without accepting its challenges will increase
the moral potency of religion and decrease the possibility of its
corruption by those who want to use it for the purpose of insuring the
dignity of human life without paying the price of moral effort for the
boon.

There is no reason why the comforting assurances of religion should be
sacrificed completely. Science is not inimical to the assumption of
religion that personal and moral values have a basis in the universe
itself which insures their permanence and their further refinement.
Though God works his will against the inertia of the concrete world
and the waywardness of man, neither science nor history justifies
the conclusion that his resources are not ultimately equal to the
creative task. The intractableness of the world makes the creative
and redemptive struggle real but not hopeless. Religion has as much
right to preach hope as it has to preach repentance. It fails in its
task if it does not save men from despair as well as from undue pride
and complacency. There is nothing in either science or history which
invalidates either function of religion. But science unites with
moral experience in insisting on the reality and the painfulness of
the creative process in man and in nature. If the resistance to moral
purpose in cosmic history is underestimated, it merely serves to
increase that resistance in the life of man by justifying his moral
inertia. The needs of a dynamic religion are consistent with scientific
fact, though not always compatible with a completely consistent
metaphysics. Science may well combine with religion in persuading man
that “if hopes are dupes, fear may be liars,” and that he must “work
out his salvation with fear and trembling.”




                               CHAPTER IX

                               CONCLUSION


At the risk of unnecessary repetition it may be well to capitulate the
most important conclusions which emerge from our study of religion in
contemporary civilization. Religion is dying in modern civilization not
only because it has not yet been able to restate its affirmations so
that they will be consistent with scientific fact, but also because it
has not been able to make its ethical and social resources available
for the solution of the moral problems of modern civilization. Its
rejuvenation therefore waits upon a reorientation of its ethical
traditions as well as of its theological conceptions. It is under the
necessity of finding some metaphysical basis for its personalization of
the universe, but its scientific and philosophical respectability will
be of no avail if the moral fruits which issue from its affirmations
and experiences do not actually qualify the brute struggle of life, so
largely determined by natural forces.

Religion is scientifically verified if freedom and purpose are found to
have a place in the cosmic processes, and it is ethically justified if
it helps to create and maintain creative freedom and moral purpose in
human life. The present moral impotence of Protestant Christianity is
partially derived from the inadequacy of some of its traditions which
it inherited out of periods of history which had different moral needs
than our own day. Its individualism rendered a universal service at the
dawn of the modern era but survives to-day chiefly as a sanctification
of the peculiar interests and prejudices of one particular class in
Western society. The limitations of its ethical traditions are easily
obscured not only because all religion easily gives the semblance
of finality to the relativities of history, but because a religion
which imagines itself devoted to the spirit of Jesus is under the
temptation of exploiting the prestige of his absolute ethics without
approximating his ethical position.

The moral effectiveness of religion depends upon its ability to detach
itself from the historical relativities with which its ideals are
inevitably compounded in the course of history. The avowed loyalty
of the Christian church to the spirit of Christ may become the basis
of such a detachment, since there is little in the gospel of Jesus
which conforms to the dominant interests of modern life. But the very
reverence in which Jesus is held may operate to obscure the essential
genius of his life. Religion is therefore under the necessity of
developing the critical faculty even while it maintains its naïvete
and reverence. The necessity of coöperation between the naturally
incompatible factors of reason and imagination, of intelligence
and moral dynamic, is really the crux of the religious and moral
problem in modern civilization. The complexity of modern life demands
that moral purpose be astutely guided; but moral purpose itself is
rooted in ultra-rational sanctions and may be destroyed by the same
intelligence which is needed to direct it. Both humility and love,
the highest religious virtues, are ultra-rational; yet they cannot
be achieved in an intricate social life without a discriminating
intelligence which knows how to uncover covert sins and to discover
potential virtues. The incidental limitations which every historic type
of religion reveals can be dealt with only if the religious devotee
can be persuaded to regard the values of his religion critically;
yet the cultivation of such a critical spirit may easily lead to the
enervation of the religious spirit itself. If the highest values of
religion are themselves conditioned rather than absolute, it must be
possible to assign them a place in the hierarchy of values, without
encouraging a complete loss of confidence in them. Such a task is
difficult but not impossible. A robust moral idealism will help
to create a spiritual fervor which will not be easily defeated by
any superficial intellectualism. If institutions of religion gave
preference to the ethical rather than the intellectual problem of
religious faith, it might be possible to create a religious spirit
sufficiently vigorous to permit the free play of the critical faculties
without a loss of moral or spiritual dynamic. Obviously civilization
cannot afford to dispense with either the irrational moral will or
the critical intelligence by which it is made effective in complex
situations. Men need to subject all partial moral achievements to
comparison with the absolute standards of truth, beauty and goodness of
their religious faith, and yet be able to see and willing to concede
the relativities in the absolute values of their devotion. They can
be saved from a morality of mere utilitarianism only by the religious
quest for an absolute moral standard; yet they need to be discerning
enough to see that every ethical achievement, even when inspired by
religious motives, is tinged with prudential self-interest. They must
continue to strive after freedom and yet realize that human life and
character is largely determined by environment. If they seek happiness,
divorced from fortune, they nevertheless cannot escape the duty of
making the material world serve human welfare. Their ability to
discover the transcendent values in human personality has value only
if they maintain faith in human nature after they have discovered its
imperfections. They must search after the perfect goodness in God and
yet be prepared to face the cruelties of life without either denying
their reality or being driven to despair by them.

If it is true that moral sincerity is even more necessary to a vital
religion in modern life than intellectual modernity, a strategy must
be developed to sever religious idealism from the unethical tendencies
in modern civilization. Any strategy which will succeed in such an
enterprise will savor of asceticism. The limitations of historic
asceticism may teach the present how to avoid inevitable pitfalls
in the task of detaching religious idealism from the corruptions of
society. An asceticism which flees the world and develops its saints at
the price of abandoning industrial civilization even more completely to
the natural and anarchic forces which operate in its life, is obviously
of no use to modern civilization. Yet a type of asceticism is needed,
if for no other reason, because greed is the dominant motive of Western
civilization and nothing less than an ascetic discipline will free
religious idealism from its entanglement with the covetousness of
modern life. Since Western life is intent upon material advantages,
no religious idealism can maintain any degree of purity if it does
not enter into a conscious conflict with the civilization in which it
functions and succeed in setting some bounds to the expansive desires
of men and of nations.

The church as such has sufficient spiritual resources to become the
recruiting ground for such a movement of detachment, but it is too
much to hope that it will take the leadership in it. It is too deeply
enmeshed with the interests and prejudices of contemporary civilization
to possess the insight and courage which the enterprise requires. Such
a movement of detachment must be, as it has always been, a minority
movement. But the minority ought not detach itself from the majority
so completely that it will sacrifice the possibility of acting as
a leaven in it. There is no force or strategy which can prevent the
great majority from using religion to give human personality dignity
and self-respect without a serious effort to approximate a moral
ideal which would justify religion’s estimate of human worth. Some
types of religion will continue to obscure the defects in nature and
human nature. They will reassure the perplexed soul by recounting the
victories of the past without seeking new triumphs. They will build
systems of faith upon past experiences without any effort to validate
or amend them in fresh experience. Thus rejuvenation and progress must
come from the few who understand the fuller implications of the faith
which they share with the multitudes whose eyes are holden and who lack
the courage to follow even such visions as may come to them.

A highly spiritual religion cannot be an esoteric possession to which
the multitudes may never aspire. It cannot afford to lose confidence
in the multitudes; yet it must resist the gravitation toward moral
mediocrity among them. It certainly must avoid the cultivation of
a priestly cult into which the layman cannot be initiated. If the
modern movement of detachment is to be effective it must in fact be
a layman’s movement; for it must express itself in rebuilding the
social order rather than in building new religious institutions. Its
most effective ministers will be laymen who will lack neither the
technical skill nor the spiritual resource to deal with the practical
problems of industry and politics. Religious teachers may help to
inspire such a movement, but its efficacy will depend upon those who
are engaged in the world’s work. If the greed of Western civilization
is to be qualified by religious idealism, it will be accomplished by
men who use and direct the machines of modern industry without making
mechanical efficiency an end in itself and without succumbing to the
lure of the material rewards which come so easily to those who are
proficient in the industrial enterprise. A revival of either puritan
or monastic asceticism will be unequal to the task which faces modern
religion. Puritanism sanctified economic power, and monasticism fled
its responsibilities. The new asceticism must produce spiritualized
technicians who will continue to conquer and exploit nature in the
interest of human welfare, but who will regard their task as a social
service and scorn to take a larger share of the returns of industry
than is justified by reasonable and carefully scrutinized needs. The
new asceticism must, in short, be in the world and yet not of the
world. It must be truly scientific in gauging the advantage to human
personality in the conquest of nature and truly religious in finding
a basis for human happiness beyond the material rewards which this
conquest returns.

If Christian idealists are to make religion socially effective they
will be forced to detach themselves from the dominant secular desires
of the nations as well as from the greed of economic groups. The
socially minded portion of the church has in fact made some progress in
this direction. The lessons of the World War have not been altogether
futile, and there is a wholesome mood of repentance in the church
for its easy connivance with an unethical nationalism in the past
centuries. The church has not yet had an opportunity to prove the
sincerity of its contrition in this matter, for the moment of crisis
has not yet come. In that moment, which will come inevitably, many
religiously inspired peace idealists will no doubt bow their knees to
Baal; but there is real reason to hope that there is a new conscience
in the church which will resist the claims of an unethical nationalism
to the utmost. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the religious idealists
who have become critical of an unethical nationalism is that they are
not sufficiently aware of the intimate and organic relation between
the imperialism of nations and the whole tendency of avarice which
characterizes Western life. Too few realize that it is not possible
to detach oneself from an unethical nationalism if one continues to
enjoy the material advantages which flow from the nation’s unqualified
insistence upon the right to hold its advantages against the world.
It may be impossible to arrive at a complete equalization of living
standards among all individuals who desire to achieve and express the
ideal of the brotherhood of man. But a religious idealism which does
not move in that direction will be convicted of insincerity and moral
confusion. Unrepentant political realists may well pour contempt upon
it and justly accuse those who profess it of profiting from policies
which they ostensibly condemn. Religious idealism is in desperate need
of a strategy which will express its detachment from the dominant
desires and impulses of modern civilization by something more than
desultory and usually qualified criticism of unethical political ideals
and industrial policies.

The old challenge “be ye not conformed to this world” must be accepted
anew in a more heroic fashion than is customary in enlightened
religious circles. The policy of building a Kingdom of God by
regenerating individual lives has become discredited, not because
moral character is dispensable to a wholesome social life, but
because the criteria of moral character have been too individualistic
to serve the needs of modern society. It is important enough that
men gain some control over their immediate desires and discipline
their momentary passions. Society is always in need of integrated
personalities. But the validity of the religious ideal must finally
be judged by its capacity to create not only unified personalities
but personalities which know how to restrain their expansive desires
for the sake of social peace. Religion intensifies selfishness
when it adds sanctity to a respectable selfish life and creates a
self-respect which is impervious to emotions of contrition. If the
religious ideal is to gain any potency in modern life it must be able
to convict men of sin and inspire them to a conversion. But the sins
of which they need most to be convicted are those which are covert
in the social and economic relations which custom has hallowed;
and the conversion of life which is most needed is that which will
express itself in terms of the economic and political relationships
in which men live. Not to be conformed to this world, if it is to
have any real meaning in modern life, will mean that the religiously
inspired soul knows how to defeat the avarice and to overcome the
indifference to the worth of human personality which inheres in the
whole economic and industrial structure of modern society. Practically
and individually such a detachment from the world will express itself
in the sacrifice of material advantages for the sake of realizing a
more intimate fellowship with the underprivileged, in the careful
analysis of industrial policies from the standpoint of their effect
upon personality, in an unwillingness to profit by social and economic
practices and policies which are fundamentally unethical and in a
willingness to bear some pain for the sake of expressing loyalty to the
community of mankind as against all lesser and conflicting loyalties.

The hope of persuading any large number of religious people to
express their spiritual convictions in any such socially tangible
and revolutionary terms is made rather desperate by the fact that
the modern church seems no more inclined to undertake the task of
spiritual regeneration than the orthodox church. The orthodox church
still possesses some of the religious fervor which is required to
defy the world, but it is too anti-rational in its theology to gain
the respect of the intelligent classes and too individualistic in its
ethics to express religious idealism in socially helpful terms. The
modern churches are not acutely conscious of any serious defects in
contemporary civilization. If they do recognize limitations in the
social order, they give themselves to the pleasant hope that time
and natural progress will bring inevitable triumph to every virtuous
enterprise. They have relegated the eschatological note of the gospel,
by which Jesus expressed his sense of the tragic, to the limbo of
theological antiquities. The possibility of a catastrophe seems never
to arouse their fears or to give energy to their ambitions. Life,
according to their gospel, goes automatically from grace to grace and
from strength to strength.

Though neither the orthodox nor the modern wing of the Christian
church seems capable of initiating a genuine religious revival which
will evolve a morality capable of challenging and maintaining itself
against the dominant desires of modern civilization and yet expressing
itself in terms relevant to civilization’s needs, there are resources
in the Christian religion which make it the inevitable basis of any
spiritual regeneration of Western civilization. Christianity, as Dr.
Ernst Troeltsch has observed, is the fate of Western society. Spiritual
idealisms of other cultures and societies may aid it in reclaiming its
own highest resources; and any universal religion capable of inspiring
an ultimately unified world culture may borrow from other religions.
But the task of redeeming Western society rests in a peculiar sense
upon Christianity. It is congenial to the energy and activism of
Western peoples and is yet capable of setting bounds to their expansive
desires. It has reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion and
self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion through self-denial and
made the cross the symbol of life’s highest achievement. Its optimism
is rooted in pessimism and it is therefore able to preach both
repentance and hope. It is able to condemn the world without enervating
life and to create faith without breeding illusions. Its adoration
of Jesus sometimes obscures the real genius of his life but cannot
permanently destroy the fruitfulness of his inspiration. If there is
any lack of identity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of
religious experience, the Jesus of history is nevertheless more capable
of giving historical reality to the necessary Christ idea than any
character of history. Intelligence will gradually soften prejudices and
allay the conflict between Christianity and the Judaism out of which it
emerged and with which it is organically related so that the religions
of the prophetic ideal may make common cause. Such a coöperation will
probably never lead to complete fusion because Christianity cannot
afford to sacrifice the Christ idea and the Jews will continue to
regard this as a Hellenistic and unacceptable element in the Christian
religion. Christianity will not disavow it, for it gives dramatic
force and historical concretion to its theism and dualism. The God
of our devotion is veritably revealed most adequately in the most
perfect personality we know, as he is potentially revealed in all
personal values; and his conflict with the inertia of the concrete and
historical world is expressed most vividly in the cross of Christ.
When dealing with life’s ultimates, symbolism is indispensable, and a
symbolism which has a basis in historic incident is most effective. The
idea of a potent but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated by
the world but gains its victory in the defeat must remain basic in any
morally creative world view.

It is possible of course that the resources of the Christian religion
will not be made available in time to save Western civilization from
moral bankruptcy. It is possible that life will continue to run its
course of conflict between the unrestrained ambitions and desires of
individuals and groups until unqualified self-assertiveness will issue
in mutual destruction. It is possible that cynicism will continue
to discount the moral potentialities of human nature while science
continues to give plausibility to a depreciation of the moral factors
in life by arming the brute in man and making his vices more deadly.
Civilization may be beyond moral redemption; but if it is to be
redeemed a religiously inspired moral idealism must aid in the task.
A purely naturalistic ethics will not only be overcome by a sense
of frustration and sink into despair, but it will lack the force to
restrain the self-will and self-interest of men and of nations. If life
cannot be centered in something beyond nature, it will not be possible
to lift men above the brute struggle for survival. Intelligence may
mitigate its cruelties and prudence may prompt men to eliminate its
worst inhumanities; but the increased power which the conquest of
nature supplies merely substitutes unintended cruelties for those which
have been consciously abolished. Living on the naturalistic level men
are bound to contend for life’s physical prizes and to use physical
force in the contest with more and more deadly effect.

It is the virtue of a vital religious idealism that it lifts life
above the level of nature and makes the development of an ethical
personality the ultimate goal of human existence. Without the vivid
and realistic other-worldly hopes and fears with which the medieval
church disciplined life and which the modern church cannot restore,
it may seem that religion possesses no force which could counteract
the primitive impulses which move men and nations. But these hopes
and fears were merely crude ways of expressing the idea that life
is fundamentally moral and that its destiny transcends the animal
conflict. Life will continue to develop in the direction of the ideal
implicit in it and every organism is impelled to move toward the
goal of its own completeness. The ideal implicit in human character
is that of ethical freedom; and awakened personalities will seek to
realize that ideal. They will seek to realize it even at the expense
of physical sacrifices and pain. They will learn how to find life by
losing it. It is the quest for what is not real but is always becoming
real, for what is not true but is always becoming true, that makes man
incurably religious. Modern religion is therefore not without resource
in contending against the forces of nature. The great difficulty is
that the struggle for ethical integrity is so painful that most men are
tempted to seek some short-cut to it; and organized religion generally
expresses the hopes and desires of this easygoing multitude. In the
medieval church magic provided the short-cut. In the modern church
it is provided by a sanctified prudence which teaches men how to be
unselfish and selfish at the same time, how to gain moral self-respect
without sacrificing too many temporal advantages. The hope of a revival
of ethical religion and of an ethical reconstruction of society
therefore depends, as it did in the past, upon a renunciation of the
religious short-cuts which lead to hypocrisy.

If religious aspiration can be united with perfect moral sincerity a
fruitful partnership may again be established between religion and
morality. The moral struggle will give meaning to the affirmations
of religion and the religious experience will strengthen the
moral purpose. While religion does not issue automatically in
moral action and the moral enterprise does not inevitably create
religious experience and hope, there is nevertheless a relation of
interdependence between religious aspiration and moral endeavor. This
relationship is due to the fact that a perfect ethical freedom is
possible only if personality is withdrawn from or lifted above the
immediate necessities of the physical life. The other-worldly hopes and
the mystical experience of religion by which the strategy of withdrawal
and transcendence has been effected is momentarily discredited because
it has resulted too frequently in absolving the soul of its moral
responsibilities in the specific problems of society. But the fact that
religious hopes and religious experiences may help people to escape the
onerous duties of the moral enterprise cannot permanently obscure the
need of religious experience and religious hope for the development of
an ethical life. If men are to center their life in moral purpose they
must reassure themselves periodically on the moral purpose in life
itself. That is mysticism and prayer. If they are to develop a perfect
ethical freedom which makes no compromises with life’s immediate
necessities, they must find a content and a meaning in life beyond its
present conflict of interests and desires. That is other-worldliness.
If the quest for ethical freedom and integrity does not lead to
religious experience and religious hope, it will issue in despair.
If the assurances of religious hope and the certainties of religious
experience are not accompanied by sincere moral effort, they result in
hypocrisy. The hope of an ethical society is therefore bound up in the
possibility of restoring ethical integrity to religion and religious
dynamic to the moral effect.


                              [Footnotes]

[1] Professor Alfred Whitehead, in his _Science and the Modern World_
and _Religion in the Making_, indicates the inevitable anti-mechanistic
trend of philosophical thought as it achieves mastery of the varied
fields of modern science.

[2] _Prospects of Industrial Civilization_, page 218.

[3] Matthew v. 43–48.

[4] _The Decline of the West._

[5] Stuart Mill’s refutation of LePlay’s thesis that the salvation of
the working classes can come only through the benevolence of their
superiors is worth quoting in this connection: “No times can be pointed
out in which the higher classes of this or any other country performed
a part even distantly resembling the one assigned to them in this
theory. All privileged and powerful classes have used their power in
the interest of their own selfishness. I do not affirm that what has
always been must always be. This at least seems to be undeniable, that
long before superior classes could be sufficiently inspired to govern
in the tutelary manner supposed, the inferior classes would be too much
improved to be governed.”

[6] _Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religions-Sociologie._

[7] _Religion and the Rise of Capitalism._

[8] Quoted by Tawney, _op. cit._

[9] The relation of puritanism to modern capitalism has been most
exhaustively treated by Max Weber in his essay on “Die Protestantische
Ethic und der Geist des Kapitalismus.”

[10] Quoted in Southey’s _Life of Wesley_, Chapter xxix.

[11] Both Max Weber and E. Troeltsch make much of the relation of
Calvinism to medieval asceticism. See Max Weber, _op. cit._, and E.
Troeltsch, _Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirche_.

[12] Romans vii. 19–25.

[13] _Grosser Sermon vom Wucher_ (_Werke_, Vol. IV, page 49).

[14] Article 3 in Twelve Articles, quoted by J. S. Shapiro in _Social
Reform and the Reformation_.

[15] In his _Education of Henry Adams_, Chapter x.

[16] Commenting on the first Hague conference Count Holstein of the
German foreign office made some realistic observations which may not
have justified his obstructive conclusions but which are nevertheless
pertinent. He wrote: “Subjects of international law are states and not
individuals. It will therefore be formally difficult and practically
impossible to isolate the individual judge from the passions and
interests of the whole in a way that happens or is supposed to happen
in private law. Of all conceivable judges Great Powers are least
disinterested, for in every conceivable question of any importance that
may come up all Great Powers are interested _à un degre quelconque_. An
impartial decision is therefore excluded by the nature of things....
Small disinterested states as subjects, small questions as objects of
arbitral decision are conceivable; great states and great questions are
not.” (Quoted by Dickinson in _International Anarchy_, p. 351.)

[17] _Social Evolution_, page 140.

[18] James iv. 2–4.

[19] II Corinthians iv. 16.

[20] In _Civilization and Ethics_ and _The Decay and Restoration of
Civilization_.

[21] _Christianity and Other World Religions._

[22] _Religion in the Making_, page 50.

[23] George Santayana in _Religion and Reason_, page 176.

[24] In _Development and Purpose_, page 360.

[25] In _Religion in the Making_.



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