Ex Libris [ C. K. OGDEN	1

BYWAYS OF BELIEF

'By the Same ^Author

SOCIALISM IN CHURCH HISTORY. 55. net. THE LABOUR PARTY. 2s. net.

BYWAYS OF BELIEF

BY

CONRAD NOEL

PRESENTATION OOP*

LONDON FRANK PALMER

12-14 RED LION COURT

All rights reserved First published March 1912

TO

WILLIAM &f GEORGINA PAINE

I J-. o-*-^---. -i-oxc-O^r

CONTENTS

PACE

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH . . .II

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS . . -31

POPULAR DETERMINISM AND MR BLATCHFORD . . 59

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM . . _ . . - 73

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS FOR ESCAPED ETHICISTS . . 95

TOLSTOY AN THEORY AND DOUKHOBOR PRACTICE . 115

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS . . . .139

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER . . . • JS5

SALVATIONISM ...... . . 183

THE SABBATARIANS .... . 203

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS . . .217

KENSITITES AND THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER . 235 SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY .... 249

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST ..... . 269

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH

Creedless creed-builders — Extracts and essences — The return to dogma — The nature of heresy — Conventionality versus orthodoxy — Modernism and traditionalism — The composite Catholic man — A good spiritual digestion — What is originality ? — The sheep and the goats.

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH

THE dominant protest of our times is a protest against creeds. People who believe anything definitely and can put their belief into words, are now called Creedalists. People who see the value of belonging to a fellowship are called Institutionalists. Christianity is supposed to have nothing in common with creeds or institutions, and we hear much of the essence of belief — as though the Christian Religion were a kind of meat extract, a Harnack's Eovril or a Schmiedel's Oxo. But the wiser doctors of the body will tell you that these extracts and essences are much over- rated, and the wiser doctors of the soul are coming to the same conclusion. Opponents of the Harnack's extract of belief theory may well ask if we should judge of the essential oak by the acorn, rather than by the tree, and insist that the Christian Faith is to be sought not only in the Gospel promise, but also in its historical development. They further insist — and in view of modern New Testament criticism this is significant — that even if acorn analysis were the true method, Christians, in point of fact, have no acorn to analyse, for the Gospels, however near they may

ii

12 BYWAYS OF BELIE P

be to the source of the Christian Religion, can on no possible showing be identified with that source ; in other words, we can only know the historical Jesus through the memories of two of His disciples as recorded by two of their disciples — this is the con- servative view; or, according to the liberal view, only through the memory of men who knew the first disciples, or of a still later generation. M. Loisy sums up this position in these pregnant words : " We know Christ only by the tradition, across the tradi- tion, and in the tradition of the Primitive Christians." It is astounding that theosophists, rationalists, spiritualists, and other modern heterodoxists, every one of them evolutionists in the popular sense, should be continually harking back to what they consider the Gospel seed, and pouring contempt upon its historical growth in institution and creed. And it is a curious commentary on the persistent human instinct for dogma that the people who begin by denying the value of creeds, themselves become the most fantastic of creed-builders. Attempts have recently been made to distinguish between doctrines and dogmas, and there has arisen a more moderate school among the unorthodox who recognise the need of doctrine, but object to what they call its dogmatic teaching. The most interesting exponent of this distinction is Mr Lloyd Thomas, who contends that dogma is a doctrine of which the Church has made a law. " It is the element of official and external imposition that carries doctrine over into dogma. The very word signifies a command ... it implies, then, an external official authority claiming a compel-

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 13

ling obedience. ... It is the element of compulsion overriding the reason and conscience of man, and suppressing the right and duty of individual judgment, that degrades a Church from a voluntary fellowship of the spirit into a legislative and judicial authority." Mr Lloyd Thomas illustrates this by reference to the doctrine of evolution, which is " universally accepted by scientific men, but is not a dogma. Any man is at liberty to test and verify the facts afresh ; various interpretations may be put upon them, so that Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Weismann, do not speak exactly the same thing. Now suppose that, in order to put an end to all discussion and difference, the British Association passed a resolution : ' Such and such is the doctrine of evolution which, if any member do not believe, he shall be and is hereby excommunicated from our fellowship.' Here is intro- duced the element of artificial authority and external compulsion ; what was a scientific doctrine has now become a scientific dogma." He holds that it was necessary for the Church to define doctrines, but that when the Councils converted these into dogmas by laying them down authoritatively and excommunicat- ing or persecuting those who could not or would not believe them, they were putting insufferable limitations on the search for truth.

It is doubtful, in point of fact, if this distinction between doctrine and dogma is valid, but the question is comparatively unimportant so long as we under- stand the sense in which writers of this school use their terms. Admitting, then, that dogma means not only a body of truth collectively? agreed upon, but

i4 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

such truth authoritatively promulgated, does not the denial of dogma involve denial of the Church ? And this is precisely the point at which such thinkers arrive.

If the search for truth be the supreme object of the Christian Religion, there is, of course, no inaccuracy in Mr Lloyd Thomas's analogy with the doctrine of evolution and the British Association. But Catholics would altogether deny that the Church was built as a Society for spiritual research. It was surely built to promulgate truth and to band men together as comrades in arms. Similes are dangerous things, but the metaphor of an army is much more fitting to the idea of the Church than the metaphor of a hunting party in doubt as to the quarry it hunts. It is not a common search but a common find that unites us. This is not to be taken as meaning that the Catholics of any particular age are to pride themselves on the possession of the whole truth, but the very object of their being banded together is that they may teach and live that truth which they do possess, and that, by living it, truth may be added to them in greater measure. The search for truth has been denied by- Church officialdom, and its advocates have exalted it out of due proportion into the first essential of a Christian Church.

Now, if there be a body of truths by which men may live, and if it be all-important that men should band themselves together for the theoretic and practical expression of these truths, it surely follows that such a fellowship must speak with authority, must have some rule or discipline, must at least exercise the

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 15

right of exclusion. An invisible Church is a contra- diction in terms. It is all very well to talk of men of goodwill all over the earth united in the bonds of sympathy, and of such a unity as forming the Catholic Church. But the weakness of this position lies in the fact that ultimately it is a denial of the central doctrines of the Christian Faith — namely, of the Incar- nation, of the resurrection of the body, of the union between the spiritual and the tangible and material ; such sympathetic bonds are vague and meaningless, until the people so bound are prepared to unite in a visible organisation for the corporate practice of their spiritual theory in a world of affairs. And immediately this is remembered, we realise the necessity for a common creed, common liturgy, organisation, and the right of expulsion. Strictly speaking, the school of thought represented in England by Mr Thomas is not modernist, for technically the modernist is one who believes in a visible Church Catholic as a normal means of man's redemption, but who recognises need of reformation in that Church and the value of mental alertness and sincerity. The term itself is foolish, and was only invented by the enemies of the move- ment, but the school it nicknames is fairly distinct and definite in outlook and proposal. Mr Gilbert Chesterton has perhaps somewhat confused the issue by including men like Nietzsche as modernists, but the modernist is one who accepts the Christian tradi- tion while behaving towards his Church precisely as Mr Chesterton would have a true patriot behave towards his country. The Ultramontane might with accuracy be called the theological Jingo.

1 6 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Immediately we unite together on the basis of a common faith for common action, we inevitably be- come exclusive. Affirmation implies exclusion. You cannot affirm that there is a God without excluding the notion that there is no God. You cannot lay down that it is wrong to torture men without ex- cluding the notion that it is at the same time right. And if certain men have banded themselves together on the basis that God is the Father of men, that God is good, that men should behave as brothers one to another, such a fellowship would be obliged to reserve to itself the right of expulsion should they discover that one of their members was promulgating in their name that the ultimate power behind the world is evil, and that human sacrifices are acceptable to it. Toleration is good, but toleration is not God. There are circumstances in which toleration is the cruelty of devils.

The protest against Catholic narrowness and ex- clusiveness would, I think, be legitimately met if we remembered that Catholic theologians have always suggested that the Church has a body and a spirit, and that there are many who are baptized into its body who become alien to its spirit, and many who belong to the spirit of the Church who for one reason or another have not been baptized into its body. But this is a very different position from that which denies the value of the visible fellowship.

It is, on the other hand, essential to remember that the Catholic Faith by no means altogether consists in our convictions about God, but also in God's convictions about us. Christian truth has its roots,

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 17

not in human opinion but in human nature. It is the unveiling of certain facts which are fundamental to life and of God as the foundation of life. This indeed is the justification of infant baptism in which a child, regardless of the opinions it will afterwards form, is snatched away from the ape and tiger sub-human kingdom, the kingdom " red in tooth and claw," and transplanted into a fellowship of grace ; not because it rightfully belongs to the kingdom of the lower nature, but because of right it belongs to the kingdom of true human nature which is the image of the Divine. It might therefore be argued with considerable show of reason that, however perverted might become the christened man's ideas, his excommunication would be wrong, because false opinions cannot alter the fact of his divine nature. Now, he might grow up, as did an early heretic, to teach men that human nature is essentially vile and ungodlike. A General Council anathematised this teaching and excommunicated its author. But people who argue like this do not quite understand the meaning of excommunication. The Church is a body organised with the object of de- claring to men their essential nature, their relation- ship to God and to each other, and its members are pledged to give practical effect to these truths in their individual and corporate life. This visible society is obliged, therefore, to exercise the right of exclusion if it is not hopelessly to stultify its message and paralyse its action ; but excommunication does not involve absolute and final expulsion, but temporary exclusion from the life of the actual visible fellowship. The importance of this distinction will be appreciated

1 8 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

when we remember that the Catholic Church, in reconciling the excluded member, is not allowed (by its own fundamental Faith) to re-baptize.

The protest against dogma and authority is, of course, by no means all to the bad. It is to some extent the outcome of a healthy dissatisfaction with false authority and false doctrine. The dogmas of the modern Church do not always ring true, and the people mistrust the seat of authority whether it be placed at Rome or at Canterbury. One of the most brilliant defenders of modern Catholicism, Mr Gilbert Chesterton, seems to be in some confusion in this matter. He is able to show us, as indeed all true defenders of the Catholic faith in every age have shown us, that Catholic doctrine is grounded in the perma- nent needs of human nature, and that human nature responds to it and discovers itself in and through the traditional faith. But he sometimes seems inclined to identify this authority with Rome — not, indeed, with the Roman Catholic democracies throughout the world, but with the decisions of modern Popes. Now these decisions do not find any response in the hearts and minds of the peoples of England or Italy, of France or America. It is all very well to say that the democracy in Catholic countries has worshipped Our Lady for many centuries, and that therefore the dogma of The Immaculate Conception 1 is the outcome of the democratic worship. I f this is so, it altogether destroys the contention of the modern Popes that the Church

1 One has only to compare the preamble to this doctrine promulgated at Rome with the arguments that led up to decisions of the early and democratic councils of the Church, to discover that Rome, in becoming autocratic, has become intellectually barren.

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 19

is derived from them and not they from the Church. The present Pope is not departing from Tridentine doctrine but is perfecting it when he repeats the apostolic ruling of Pius VI.,1 who pronounced that it was heretical to hold that the power of ecclesiastical government is derived from the body of the faithful, and branded as heresy that the Pope received from the Church his power of administration. In the Anglican Church many High Churchmen hold that the power of the priest and the power of the Council are derived directly from a far-off Heaven. Vaticanism goes a step further. It holds that the power of the Pope, sole emperor of the world, is given direct and through no mediumship of men from the sole Emperor of the Skies. Many modernists hold (I use the term in its technical sense) that the Catholic Faith is a revelation by God of the essential facts of human life, that the Church corresponds with those facts, that the peoples of the earth were blindly struggling towards those facts when God met them half-way. The prodigal son was trying to find a way back home, and the Father met him when he was yet a long way off. They hold, further, that the international baptized democracy is a royal priesthood, that for the sake of Holy Order or Holy Orders, bishops, priests, and deacons are appointed from the whole priestly body for different functions and administrations in the same, and that the official priesthood is the mouthpiece of the priestly democracy. This has not been the domi- nant view throughout Christian history, and yet it can claim an unbroken tradition in all places and times.

1 Apostolic Constitution, " Auctorem Fidei."

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This doctrine has been expressly and repeatedly con- demned by the modern Popes. Roman Catholics may say the condemnations have not been ex cathedra^ but if they take this ground they abandon the one solid argument in favour of a Living Voice — namely, the necessity for Authoritarian certainty in the world at all times. That argument sent Newman, and has sent thousands, over to Rome. Now, the Popes absolutely believed themselves to be speaking ex cathedra when promulgating these condemnations ; an enormous majority of Roman Catholics also believe it. But if it is to be left to private judgment as to whether the Living Voice solemnly giving its rulings is the Living Voice or not, according to whether one happens to agree with its decisions or not, the argu- ment that lost us Newman is admitted by Roman Catholics to be absolutely worthless.

On the other hand, if these decisions be infallible decisions of the supreme ruler of the Church, then we can only say that they have finally ruled out of existence the Church of which he is supposed to be ruler. They have degraded and destroyed the Catholic idea, and have made of religion an unnatural monstrosity that no one could test and no one would have any inclination towards until it was superim- posed upon men by this alien emperor. It is this perversion of the idea of authority, forced to its logical conclusion in Rome and held illogically by High Anglicans, which has goaded good men into a denial of the visible Church and its natural discipline. It is ridiculous for us to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to defend the democratic decision of de-

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 21

mocratically chosen Catholic Councils, and at the same time to defend the Papalist autocracy which has certainly repudiated the rights of the democracy in things theological and bids fair to crush democracy in the sphere of politics and social economics. Rome is a pleasant anaesthetic for the rich, but can no longer be claimed as a refuge for the poor.

It is therefore the stupidity and inhumanity of modern dogma which accounts in part for the modern revolt. By this I do not mean in the least to say that wisdom went out of the Church in the fourth century, or that the Holy Spirit departed at the end of the sixth. Nevertheless, the break up of Christendom has naturally injured the fractured parts, and it is less likely that a development of truth should be forth- coming in what Mark Twain has described as a sub- divided in place of an undivided Church — less likely, but not impossible. But if such development should so come, it will not be from the absolutist throne but from the democracy.

It is not only this addition of alien and barren dogmas which is to be noticed, but also the unintelli- gent repetition of ancient dogmas which once lived and meant life, on the part of people who have ceased to live and mean nothing. That these Catholic doctrines are capable of rejuvenation, I am convinced ; but, as preached at present, they lay no hold upon the imaginations of men and merely serve to aggravate the revolt against dogma. We shall never be rid of all the modern nonsense about undenominationalism and creedless Christianity until we have taken the trouble to understand our creed and live by it. Neither

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Protestantism nor Papalism nor Puseyism have been able to put flesh and blood to the bone structure of traditional belief, and it is all very well for us to be contemptuous of the somewhat confused and dispirit- ing dogmatic substitutes which the " byways of belief " I am here examining have to offer us. They contain, in a meagre and unbalanced condition, much that is of the true proportion of the Catholic faith, a pro- portion which we disproportioned Christians have so often abandoned. I have perhaps laid myself open to the charge of putting stress upon their errors rather than upon the truths they teach. This is not be- cause I do not recognise their elements of truth, but because their errors are peculiar to them, while the truths they each of them contain are common to them and to the Christian tradition. The truth in Christian Science about the spirit of man is essential to the Christian proportion of faith. The truth about the body of man stressed by materialism is part and parcel of the like faith. The importance of the mind of man urged by rationalism is also within the proportion of the Faith. But it is just because the orthodox have failed to be orthodox and have lapsed into conventionality, that they have lost the proportion and driven eager men into disproportioned heresies. We have lacked the impulsiveness and originality of our Catholic forefathers. They believed. We monotone their beliefs.

But the worst of the theological revolutionists is that they have never taken the trouble to study the Catholic Faith. Someone, sick of the religion of his childhood, starts a new creed, and says: " How much

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 23

better my creed is than the Christian Religion taught me by the vicar's wife, or the Sunday School neophyte, or the Rev. Septimus Ebenezer at Salem Chapel." You ask him what that religion was, and he pours out a series of appalling heresies by the side of which his own poor little pet heresy would almost seem orthodox. Then he is angry with you and accuses you of twist- ing things, and asks: " If the teachers of my youth did not teach me the true faith, what on earth is true faith ? " And it is not only the revolutionists, but the conventionalists, who know nothing of their own religion. In England we study every conceivable re- ligion but our own. We run to lectures by a Buddhist monk or a theosophic adept. We read books written in American by woolly-minded chewers of the Higher Thought. We find the latest Persian Prophet " so interestin'." But what proportion of the wary re- volters, or of the sleepy faithful, has ever mastered its own theologians, either ancient or modern ? Mr Fielding Hall knows all about the soul of a foreign people, but little about the soul of England, and noth- ing about the tradition of the Christian Church. His criticism of the Christian Religion is about as valuable as would be my criticism of Chinese music. What do these people who repudiate the Catholic faith for the creed of some foreign heresiarch know of the writings of Rashdall or Aubrey Moore, Burkitt, A. V. Allen, James Hinton, Frederick Denison Maurice, Westcott, Loisy, Newman, Illingworth, to mention a few names of very diverse and individual modern Christian theologians? What do they know of the mediaeval Christian mystics, of Eckhart, or Tauler, and

24 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

the rest? Why should they not take Mrs Besant's advice to the young Hindoo who was going to be baptized a Christian ? She advised him to study his own religion first. Why should she, and all of them, not have studied their own religion first ?

I have spoken of the necessity for a living interpre- tation of the creeds. Is it too much to hope that this wise movement with the stupid name, Catholic Modernism, may give us such an interpretation ? Has not modern physical science changed our notions of the outward facts of the ascension and of the descent into hell? Have we not ourselves abandoned some of the cruder views of Purgatory once current among us ? Could not the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity be shown to be not a lifeless and remote riddle, but a profound explanation of the composite nature of man and his universe ?

There is beneath every clause of the creed an eternal value. Whether Christ did or did not visit some mine in the bowels of the earth, does not matter. That the power of His redeeming personality broke and breaks all prison bars, and descends to the lowest depths of death and indifference in which men could find themselves in all worlds, matters everything. Whether Christ was levitated so that the disciples could see the soles of His sandals, does not much matter; but that He triumphed over death, and ascended into the innermost heart and life of God that He might fill all things and be the inspiration of all men, matters everything. The exact nature of the flame which burns men in Purgatory matters not ; but the fact that as a man sows so shall he reap, and

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC tAITH 25

that this is the justice not of a vindictive demon but of a Mighty Love, matters everything. All these things are essentials of the Catholic tradition. Men and women should be nourished with this food from babyhood. The Catholic Church in each generation should, by the Spirit of God, be able to distinguish and appropriate the essentials of the past, and to abandon the rubbish, until tradition becomes in her children as unconscious as a good digestion. Creeds, as George Meredith has told us, have too often been used as strait-jackets for humanity. Dogmas should be believed and inwardly digested so that they vitalise the whole personality which is now able to forget them because they are part of itself and go forward nourished by this living food. The old faith rightly used is a springboard from which must be made the leap into the future.

This is what constitutes originality in the individual Catholic and in the Catholic Church. Tradition has been woven into the texture of his mind, but, instead of merely repeating tradition, he has grasped its meaning and it gives him his chance, Originality does not consist in abandoning the past or cutting oneself adrift from one's fellows. The alert mind seizes upon the values of the past, and is alive to the present and a master-builder of the future.

What is true of the individual is true of the Church, which is like the mustard seed that became a mighty tree. Trees are nourished, not only through the root but through their thousand leaves which feed upon the nutriment of the air. The Christian religion has spread its branches over many countries and has

*6 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

drawn its nourishment through its leaves. It has borrowed from Plato, whom St Augustine claimed as a Christian Worthy, and later from Aristotle, whose thought was interwoven by the schoolmen into the Christian pattern. Greece and Rome and Arabia have been laid under contribution for the building of the Kingdom of God. It is almost a truism to say that the Christian Faith is, in some ways, a synthesis of other religions, and that the Church brings out of her treasury things new and old. It is wearying, therefore, to be told that we have borrowed our ceremonial from the Pagan or the Jew, or that it was only when our religion was transplanted from the meagre soil of Palestine into the generous soil of the Roman Empire, that it began to flourish. These are the very things of which we are proud ; for we believe in the Holy Spirit in whom all live and move and have their being, and from whom all good things do come. This is true, and yet it is not the whole truth ; for we perceive in the Catholic Faith a distinct revelation of the Holy Spirit, or rather, perhaps, a focussing of that Spirit in the Brotherhood which Christ founded and which is able boldly to borrow its nourishment from the most divers soils and atmo- spheres, because of this distinctive spirit within itself. The life within calls to the life without, and is able to rejuvenate itself by the demands it makes upon the world around it. The claim of originality is not always appreciated at its proper value. Someone triumphantly proves that a thought occurring in the mind of Jesus Christ is found in some Pagan sage or Jewish philosopher. Christ was therefore not original.

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 27

But the mark of originality is not to think, say, or do something entirely new and alien, but to have the power of distilling a food from a poison ; of taking in from the world around one all that is vital, and of rejecting the rest as refuse ; and finally, of giving out to the world what has been made in one's inner self a fulgent conviction, in such a way that when one preaches one's gospel, people will say " never man spake as this man." This is the originality we claim for genius. We are perfectly aware that Shakespeare borrowed some of his thoughts and all of his stories from other dramatists, but somehow or other in the process he breathed into them the breath of life. The same is true of Handel, of Beethoven, and of other original composers. So you may parallel this or that thought or saying of the Christ from this or that philosopher ; but, somehow or other, Christ breathed into them the breath of life and the Christian Faith struck upon the consciences of the world as a vast outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Not until Christians begin to appreciate their marvellous heritage, and the life-giving proportion of their own religion, will the rush into various modern heresies be stayed. Till then these Byways of Belief remain as thorns in our side, and, after all, in God's sight a living heretic is better than a dead Christian. Puseyism and Papalism have been too sectarian. They have partly devised or kept alive the Catholic idea, but they have not preached the Catholic Faith in its proportion and fullness. But just in the measure that the democracy becomes really Catholic will the Catholic Truth which lurks behind its partial expres-

28 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

sion by the various Christian bodies clear the issues. For the full and living truth, preached in the lives and words of men and women who absolutely believe it to the point of death, convinces and saves the world by judgment. It separates the sheep from the goats. The tame and lifeless thing men now call Christianity leads not only bad men, but good men, to revolt. The Catholic Faith preached in all its reasonableness will draw all men unto it, or at least all men of good- will. Nowadays the Faith is preached in so distorted a form as to drive the sheep from the fold and keep the goats placidly browsing inside.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS

The significance of founders — The selfless Mrs Eddy — The Dollar Princess — Deification — The immaculate Mother — Origins — The nature of inspiration — The Quimby controversy — The Arens case — The slimness ot "Scientists" — Do cures prove the truth of the religion ? — Organic and functional — Dr Paget criticised — The Harness Electric Belt case — The senses — Denial of "matter" irrelevant — Does Mr Dixon exist ? — Animal magnetism — The common people do not hear it gladly — A final difficulty.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS1

MR GEORGE BERNARD SHAW has asserted that the Christian gospel would have been as effective if its Founder, instead of dying on a rood, had died in His bed ; that is to say, that the consideration of a religion can be dissociated from the personality of its founder. In respect of the Christian Faith this is manifestly ridiculous ; for it is only in a secondary sense a system of ethics, and primarily the worship of God through worship of its Founder and its saints. But in the case of any other religion, if its makers are not prepared to risk their lives for it, what kind of a religion must it be ? The personality of founders must enter into our estimate of religious values, and Christian Scientists are at one with me in considering the personality of Mrs Eddy as having an important bearing on the question of their religion. Mrs Eddy is of opinion that the true understanding of Christian Science never originated in pride, rivalry, or the

1 The chapters on Christian Science and Tolstoyanism were written and printed before the deaths of Mrs Eddy and Count Tolstoy ; other- wise they would, to some extent, have been differently planned. As it is, I have thought it best to let them be published in their original form. I am indebted to the editors of the Daily Chronicle, the Sunday Chronicle, and the Daily Dispatch for permission to incorporate certain passages from articles which originally appeared in those papers. The present volume, excepting for these few excerpts, is entirely new.

31

32 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

deification of " self" l She speaks of her timidity and self-distrust, and reminds us that " meekness, selfless- ness, and love are the paths of His testimony."2 I have by my side a copy of The Christian Science Sentinel, containing a letter from Mrs Eddy, dated Pleasant View, April 20, 1903. The style of this letter is characteristic, and reminds one of Dr Barry's remark about Marie Corelli, " she never uses one word where three will suffice." The supreme " happifier of existence " begins by watering a vivid sentence from the Psalms with a few verbal futilities, and having answered such minor questions as, " Who shall be the greatest?" " Who shall inherit the earth ?" "Who shall dwell in Thy Holy Hill?" she comes to the major question, "Who shall be called to Pleasant View?" The answer embodies her interpretation of selflessness. " He who strives and attains . . . such an one is not called to Pleasant View for reformation or penance ... no mesmerist nor disloyal Christian Scientist is fit to come hither. I have no use for such, and there cannot be found at Pleasant View one of this sort. ' For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.'" . . . " It is true that loyal Christian Scientists called to the home of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science can acquire in one year the science that otherwise might cost them half a century. But this should not be the incentive for going thither. Better far that Christian Scientists go to help their helper, and thus lose all selfishness, as she has lost it, and thereby help themselves and the whole world as she has done. . . ."

1 Rudiment al Divine Science, 1898. 8 Ibid.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 33

Mary Baker G. Eddy, President of the Massa- chusetts Metaphysical College, Pastor Emeritus of The First Church of Christ Scientist, and Mother of Christian Science, has indeed helped herself very liberally in the process of helping the whole world. By constituting Science and Health as, along with the Bible, the only official literature of the movement ; by selling it at a profit of many hundreds per cent, above cost ; by issuing altered editions every few years ; by suggesting that loyal disciples should possess the latest, Mrs Eddy has been able to indulge her fancy for a twenty-thousand-pound house, gold bath-taps, and other little luxuries. The famous Eddy portrait and the inscribed spoon, twelve of which latter the really loyal disciple will possess, have also helped her. For many years Mrs Eddy herself trained healers and lecturers, and was led by Divine Revelation to charge each of them sixty pounds for three weeks' instruction. At first she1 shrank from asking so much ; subsequently she felt that the sum was ridiculously small and reduced the number of lessons, but was not " led " to reduce the fee. And if, indeed, a year in her courts is better than a thousand, the charge can hardly be considered excessive. Mr Dixon, who seems to be the official spokesman of the movement in England, denies that anyone is pressed to buy Science and Health, and in a letter to the Daily News, dated 1 9th August 1909, tells us that the exact reverse is the case. Will he deny that it is the duty of all Christian Scientists to " circulate and to sell as many of these books as they can " on pain of excommunication ?

1 Retrospections and Introspections, by Mrs Eddy, p. 71.

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34 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Mr Dixon speaks of Mrs Eddy's comparative poverty, and of her giving out of her £250,000 fortune £200,000 to one charity alone. One would be interested to know the name of that charity.

I have no a priori objection to healers making monetary charges, or to ministers of religion living by the altar, but the dollar is monstrously prominent in this particular cult, and perhaps Mr Dixon or some other Christian Scientist official would explain the logic of paying the human agent if God heals directly and not by human agency. Mark Twain's amusing, but profoundly serious and philosophic challenge concerning the payment of the imaginary healers of imaginary disease with an imaginary cheque, has not yet been taken up.

The Christian Science movement has witnessed secession after secession of one-time faithful followers. The leaders who deserted in October 1881 could no longer stand their founder's frequent outbursts of " temper, love of money, and appearance of hypocrisy." One by one, men and women of gifts and originality have come to her service, and one by one have fallen away. Some are expelled ; others leave of their own accord. All are pursued with malignant and relentless hostility.

Science and Health is described as the child of an immaculate conception. Of old, the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mary gave birth to a man, and now, the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mary give birth to a book, and a visit to Pleasant View is like the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem. For some time relics of Mrs Eddy, the chair on which she wrote, and other sacred

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 35

objects — which, by the way, we had understood Christian Scientists to say had no existence — were exhibited for veneration. Criticism became hostile, and the veneration is temporarily abandoned. Mrs Eddy herself speaks of the apocalyptic woman, the Wonder in Heaven, clothed with the sun, as having " special reference to the present age," and the official journal drives home the suggestion by describing the selfless Mother as the Heavenly Wonder and the Taber- nacle of God with men. She is continually placed on a pinnacle by the side of Christ. " She has done good to him that hated her, blessed them that cursed her, been led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before her shearers is dumb, so she has opened not her mouth." It is a common note of heretics that they are always imagining the martyrdom of their safe and comfortable leaders, but such language applied to this opulent woman is a piece of colossal impertinence. I should not myself have chosen the word dumbness to characterise the virulent attacks on people who have served her faithfully for many years and have subsequently had the misfortune to disagree with her. Mrs Eddy is a terrible despot. The suspects have no right of self-defence. She may snuff them out like candle-wicks ; and what wonder, when she claims infallible judgment as to what her victims, whom she calls " malicious mental practitioners," 1 are mentally arguing? She denies that she receives peculiar honour as Mother Mary, and, in the face of growing criticism, the title Leader has for the moment been

1 Christian Science History, ist and 2nd editions, p. 16 ; Mark Twain, p. 148.

36 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

substituted for that of Mother. But what is the worth of her dental and the contradictions of her followers, when one of the bye-laws (Art. xxii. Sec. i) reads as follows: " If any female member calls herself mother, or allows it (except according to the flesh), the use of such a title shall be considered an act of disrespect to Mrs Eddy."1 The National Christian Science Association held in New York, 27th May 1890, sent to its "Mother" "greetings and words of affection from her assembled children." The reply telegram reads : " All hail ! He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the sick hath He not sent empty away. Mother Mary."

As to Science and Health, the earlier editions are almost unreadable, and the very latest are in not much better case. The 1886 edition is different, for she had secured the help of the Rev. James H. Wiggan as collaborator. When Mr Wiggan rewrote the book, he described himself as " keeping Mrs Eddy from making herself ridiculous," but later he came to believe that this "awfully smart woman, acute, shrewd, but not well read," did not care to have her paragraphs too clear, and delighted in so expressing herself that her words may have dubious meaning. His final comment on Mrs Eddy is that she will never under- stand philosophy, but " dollars and cents she under- stands thoroughly."

Her claim to exclusive revelation is mean and ungenerous in face of the facts. Sixteen years before Mrs Eddy made her "original discovery," Andrew Jackson Davis, the father of modern spiritism, had

1 Cf. Official Report, p. 24.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 37

published The Physician, Nature's Divine Revelations, The Great Harmonia. He speaks of "Divine Science," of God as " Principle," of the Devil as " evil." The actual title " Christian Science " had been used in 1840 by Abram Cowles, and appears in 1850 over the signature of the Rev. W. Adams. Mr Davis's thought and phraseology resemble Mrs Eddy's, and where he differs from her in thought, the divergence is all in his favour. His popularity was immense, and his books sold like hot cakes. Davis declined to be made the head of a Church, and on the completion of his first great work, which soon reached its thirtieth edition, he renounced any share of the profits. Davis was what Mrs Eddy proclaims herself to be, meek and unselfish.

Is it wise, at this time of day, for Christian Scientists to insist on the isolation of their leader's thought from the thought of her age ? Is it worth while urging a special revelation, in the sense that she borrowed nothing from and owes nothing to any other thinker, in face of the fact that the statement is not only evidently untrue, but also evidently irrelevant ? It seems a little childish to urge that Dr Quimby played no part in the inception of Christian Science.

Granted that Christian Science is true, it is no more nor less true because it is heralded by a blare of trumpets from heaven, or revealed in special vision, or suggested in the manuscript of an old gentleman called Quimby. The method and the letter killeth ; the spirit giveth life. I have pointed out in the introduction to this volume that the Christian claim to originality is consistent with the fact of any amount of borrowing, and, if even Christ was not

38 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

isolated from the world of thought and feeling around Him, it would seem unnecessary for Mrs Eddy to insist on such entire independence. If on waking from a swoon some truth is left me which evermore burns in me as fulgent conviction, and changes for me and for my fellows the course of life and the face of the world, I may count that to be inspiration and revela- tion. But it comes to me no less assuredly and with no less inspired conviction if some man has told it me, and I have since made it my own, sealing it with the seal of my own innermost inborn nature ; for my fellow-men and women are God's children and God's ministers, and God's plenipotentiaries. If Mrs Eddy cared to proclaim herself the most prominent figure in the application of a particular phase of the Gospel to modern needs, if she insisted that the realisation of God as our Health was an idea that she had made peculiarly her own, she would be on safe and solid ground. That Mrs Eddy possesses a powerful personality and distinct originality, no one wishes to deny. At about the age of fifty, when most women are beginning to feel old and spent, she began to feel young, and found herself preparing for her life's work in the urge of an overmastering idea.

The Quimby controversy is becoming wearisome, but, in face of repeated and persistent denials of borrowing on the part of Christian Scientists, it will be necessary briefly to repeat the facts. On 7th Novem- ber 1862, the Portland Courier published a letter from Mrs Eddy, in which she describes her startling cure by a certain Dr Quimby, and denies that his method was mesmerism or animal magnetism.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 39

" Now I can see dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr Quimby's faith and works ; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth is my recovery. This truth, which he opposes to the error of giving intelli- gence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action. This is a science capable of demonstration . . . the truth which he establishes in the patient cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof), and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease. After all, this is a very spiritual doctrine, but the eternal years of God are with it and it must stand firm as the Rock of Ages. And to many a poor sufferer it may be found, as by me, ' the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.' "

She was at this time asked if she believed Quimby to be the Christ ? and replies in the Courier that he is the resurrection bringer, and rolls the stone away from the sepulchre of error. Her language surprises her friends, " whose minds are all matter." In letters still extant, she asks for absent treatment, requests treatment for stomachic troubles which she calls " small beliefs," talks of Quimby's omnipresence, and in a communica- tion dated 1862, asserts that Quimby heals as did Christ. In early 1864 we find her studying under Dr Quimby, and a fellow-student affirms her to have been wild with excitement about his method, which he taught her to call " science," her illnesses being "errors." In a letter dated 24th April 1864, Mrs Eddy herself describes his method as "Spiritual Science." Both her letters and speeches before and

40 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

directly after Quimby's death are conclusive on the point of her indebtedness to him for the main principles of the new religion. If further proof is wanted of the nature of Quimby's teaching, it will be found in a little worn and faded scrap-book bearing on the fly-leaf the name of P. P. Quimby. His wife pasted it in for him now and then in the fifties and early sixties. It consists of newspaper comments on his work. Every comment witnesses to the fact that he was not a mesmerist, but a spiritual healer. For instance, in an article dated 3rd December 1860, appearing in the Free Press, Lebanon, New Hamp- shire, the writer says : " The foundation of his theory is that disease is not self-existent nor created by God, but that it is purely the invention of man." An extract, dated 1861, speaks of Quimby curing diseases without medicines or hypnotism. In the Advertiser^ Portland, I3th February 1862, Quimby himself writes : " I deny disease as truth, but admit it as deception."

In the Quimby manuscripts, which pre-date Science and Health by many years, is found the familiar phraseology of Christian Science. Illness is error, disease does not exist except as man's illusion, disease is "false reasoning," God is "Principle," "my philo- sophy will free man from sin, sickness, and death." The system is actually called "Christian Science." On 1 6th January 1866 the doctor died.

In 1875, Mrs Eddy publishes the first edition of Science and Health^ in which Quimby is referred to as a mesmerist to whom she is in no way indebted. Since then she has sneered at and belittled the dead

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 41

man in every conceivable way. In the 1898 edition she is explicit concerning her independence. "No human tongue or pen taught me the science contained in this book." But on 1 1 th March 1 87 1 she had replied to the questions of a certain Mr Wright as follows : " Has this theory ever been advertised or practised before you introduced it, or by any other individual ? " Answer : " Never advertised, and practised only by one individual, who healed me, Dr Quimby of Portland, an old gentleman who had made it a research for twenty-five years, starting from the standpoint of magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that behind. I discovered the art in a moment's time, and he acknowledged it to me." In 1862 she denied that Dr Quimby's system was mesmerism. In 1875 she affirms that it was. Later, she affirms that it was not. She is again questioned on the point, and reverts to her assertion of 1875, asserting that the physical contact of his hands with the patient's head is con- clusive proof of his mesmerism. But Mrs Eddy herself used physical contact after her alleged " revelation," and asserted that Quimby's method was that of Christ. Was Christ therefore a mesmerist ? If physical contact proves mesmerism, she must answer yes, for He laid His hands on children, used clay and spittle in healing, suffered a woman to touch His gar- ment, etc. She herself has used physical aids. Is she therefore a mesmerist ?

Now, this question of mesmerism is profoundly interesting. Mesmerism, hypnotism, or "suggestion" appears in reality to be only an intense and concen- trated form of the ordinary human influence that one

42 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

person exerts over another. It is now acknowledged that this science does not necessarily require the medium of touch to effect its ends, though the contact of the hands is perhaps its most usual method. In itself there is nothing either evil or good ; it may be put to good or bad uses. It does not necessarily involve the weakening of the patient's will ; its effects are often in this direction, but in certain cases the will is actually strengthened by its means. It is highly significant that Christian Scientists are forbidden to study books dealing with the science of suggestion. Is this because their founder knows her own methods to be mesmeric, and is interested in keeping the truth about "sug- gestion" as far as possible secret? It has been wisely said that the method of the Christian Science healer is to all intents and purposes that of the hypno- tist " By the silence, the motionless sitting, the sub- dued voice, the cabalistic sentences — for they are senseless and cannot excite the intelligence — the mind is soothed ; then the suggestion is given, and in the denial of disease the repeated assertion of particular cure is pointedly made and impressed ; thus directed, the mind exercises its power, all too little used, of stimulating nerval action, and so induces in the tissues the change which thought desires."

When at last Mrs Eddy's opponents confronted her with evidence which conclusively proved that Dr Quimby was not a mesmerist in her sense of the term, she began to adopt an entirely new and contradictory line of defence. There was indeed, she now admitted, some element of Christian Science in his teaching, but it was suggested to him by herself! Equally

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 43

amusing are her prevarications about her own cure. According to her 1862 statement, Dr Quimby signally succeeded in healing her ; but, according to her 1897 statement, he has signally failed. Finally she starts an altogether new theory. She admits that PERHAPS after all she was cured by him, and had PERHAPS gone about the country proclaiming her cure by him ; and had PERHAPS written letters in which she spoke of his spiritual principle of the non-existence of matter, but she adds that all this must have been done under the influence of his mesmerism. This is PERHAPS the most unfortunate story of all, for over and over again Mrs Eddy assures us that out of mesmerism can come no true thing ; yet she now tells us that mesmerism induced in her the belief that matter is non-existent — induced in her, that is to say, the foundation belief of Christian Science. Therefore, according to the founder of Christian Science, Christian Science is itself a lie.

Mrs Eddy would give anything in the world to possess those damning MSS., and has made at least one clever move to obtain them. She offered their custodians to publish them at her own expense, " provided that I am allowed first to examine the said MSS., and do find that they were his own composition and not mine." Needless to add, the custodians of the Quimby MSS. did not fall into the trap.

The Christian Science leaders are not trustworthy, as the following evidence will show. Some years ago a Mr Arens published a pamphlet, much of which was simply lifted from the pages of Science and Health, and, in 1883, Mrs Eddy quite naturally sued him for an infringement of her copyright. Arens, familiar

44 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

with the Quimby versus Eddy controversy, put up a ridiculous defence. He alleged that he had not borrowed from her, but from Quimby, but the Quimby MSS. are not published. No one charges Mrs Eddy with legal theft. She is charged with moral theft, with the theft of an idea and not the infringement of a copyright The Court had not to decide on whether Mrs Eddy had borrowed from an unpublished work of Quimby 's, but whether Arens had borrowed from a published work of Mrs Eddy's. The evidence was conclusive against him. The Court therefore decided in her favour, and issued a perpetual injunction re- straining him from circulating his pamphlet. The Christian Science leaders, solely on the strength of this decision, proceeded to declare that the American Courts had decided the Quimby controversy in Mrs Eddy's favour ! This false statement is reiterated in every country, on every possible occasion. Christian Science methods are ably illustrated in the person of Mr Frederick Dixon. Some time ago I had occasion to review Mr Lyman Powell's book on Christian Science in the pages of the Daily News. In the course of my review I gave the chief points of evidence enumerated in the present chapter, and urged the con- clusiveness of the Quimby newspaper cuttings. Mr Dixon writes to the Daily News (8th April 1908) that to accuse " Mrs Eddy of plagiarising Mr Quimby's ideas because, in the days when she was painfully threading her way through the labyrinth of human theories to the goal of Christian healing, she at one time came in contact with Mr Quimby, is just as reasonable as it would be to declare that inductive

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 45

philosophy was established by Plato because Aristotle was his pupil. The truth is, that the facsimiles of the Quimby MSS., recently published in an American magazine, are not facsimiles at all, for the simple reason that the writers of the article in which they were published never saw a Quimby MSS. in their lives. This interesting fact was unearthed, not by a Christian Scientist, but by a Roman Catholic writer who visited Mr Quimby's son with respect to the matter. Mr Quimby, it is true, claims that he possesses some such MSS., but he declares equally emphatically that they are locked up in a safe and that no one but himself has ever seen them. Neither do the disseminators of the story ever care to dwell on the awkward fact that the suggestion has already once been the cause of legal proceedings in the States; nor tell how, in the year 1883, the Boston Courts ordered the destruction of a book which had infringed Mrs Eddy's copyright on the pretext that her writings were not original but had been copied from MSS. composed by Mr Quimby, and at the same time ordered the defendant to pay all Mrs Eddy's costs, and issued an injunction restraining him under the penalty of ten thousand dollars from printing any more copies of his book."

The letter contains at least three false suggestions. The first is the suggestion that our sole reason for charging Mrs Eddy with plagiarism is based on her happening at one time to come across Dr Quimby. The second is the suggestion that no one who has written on the Quimby MSS. has ever had personal access to them. It must be remembered that Mr

46 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Dixon is answering my review of Mr Powell's book, in which the MSS. in question are quoted. Mr Powell, who is rector of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts, made a thorough examination of witnesses for and against Mrs Eddy's claim. These are his own words: " Into the vexed question of the Quimby manuscripts which, through the courtesy of Mr George A. Quimby, I have readt there is no need to enter" The third is contained in the statement that disseminators of the story of Mrs Eddy's indebted- ness to Quimby " never care to dwell on the awkward fact" of the Law Court proceedings. This third statement can only be called, to use the words of a contemporary, calculated and frigid, in face- of the fact that Mr Powell, in the very book in question, dwells upon the proceedings of this trial in con- siderable detail.1

It is therefore beyond dispute that Mrs Eddy borrowed her fundamental ideas from others, although she herself remains probably their most prominent and picturesque exponent. In August 1879 the Massa- chusetts Metaphysical College was founded, its buildings consisting of Mrs Eddy's parlour and its entire faculty consisting of Mrs Eddy. From these small beginnings has grown one of the most formid- able and wealthy organisations in the world.

While Mrs Eddy and her healers teach that healing physical sickness is unimportant compared with the healing of sin, they would be the last to deny that the majority of their adherents have come to them for cure of body and rest of mind. While one is not

1 Powell's Christian Science, p. 45.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 47

disposed to deny the curative properties of Christian Science, one finds it almost impossible to come at the facts. Several persons known to me have been invited by Christian Scientists to investigate, but, on accepting the invitation, have invariably been put off with one excuse or another ; when all else fails, one is told that the patient must on no account talk about his former symptoms, though he is encouraged to talk about them at the testimony meetings. That cures are effected seems certain, but whether the diseases healed are functional or organic, it is at present impossible to say. Even where there has been medical examination of an illness described as organic, and a cure is effected, the prejudiced doctor will plead a wrong diagnosis. Moreover, it is possible that the line of demarcation between functional and organic disease is growing fainter. Many illnesses once considered organic are now classed as functional, and undoubtedly the power of the mind may be operative for good or evil, even in so-called organic cases. Dr Stephen Paget seems to think it very absurd that Christian Science should be considered preventative in the case of catarrh, and is beside himself with amusement at the idea that the mental factor can affect a broken limb. That Dr. Paget under-estimates the power of mentality in medicine is no less certain than that Christian Scientists ex- aggerate it For all that, his evidence, with however many reservations, should be taken. " Not long ago I tabulated for a book on Christian Science two hundred consecutive ' testimonies of healing.' These testimonies were published in the Christian Science

48 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Sentinel between April and August of last year. The vast majority were cases of indigestion, constipation, backache, headache, tired feeling, weakness of vision, functional disabilities, downright imagination, and so forth. I inquired into the alleged healings of grave organic diseases. I found not one authenticated case of any such healing. I found nothing, absolutely nothing, that might not have got well 'of itself,' or got well, or at any rate better, under one or another of the many forms of mental treatment. The general style of these two hundred testimonies was fantastical, vague, illiterate, and absolutely worthless ; they were just like the testimonials to So-and-So's pills. But the Editor of the Sentinel corrects the bad spelling ; and solemnly publishes for the edification of the faithful all the confessions of these poor, ill-educated, neurotic lives, many of them not far from the edge of insanity.

" Christian Science does not publish her failures. So I wrote to some doctors, and other friends, asking them to tell me cases of the harm that she has done. I got back a long list of killed and wounded ; I wish that it could be nailed to the doors of all her churches. I could only publish it, saying: ' To see the full iniquity of these cases the reader should be a doctor, or should go over them with a doctor. But everybody, doctor or not, can feel the cruelty, born of the fear of pain, in some of these Scientists, the downright madness threatening not a few of them, and the appalling self- will. They bully dying women and let babies die in pain ; let cases of paralysis tumble about and hurt themselves ; rob the epileptic of their bromide, the

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 49

syphilitic of their iodide, the angina cases of their amyl nitrite, the heart cases of their digitalis ; let appendicitis go on to septic peritonitis, gastric ulcer to perforation of the stomach, nephritis to uraemic convulsions, and strangulated hernia to the miserere mei of gangrene ; watch day after day while a man or a woman slowly bleeds to death; compel them who should be kept still to take exercise ; and with- hold from all cases of cancer all hope of cure. To these works of the devil they bring their one gift, wilful and complete ignorance ; and their "nursing" would be a farce, if it were not a tragedy. Such is the way of Christian Science, face to face, as she loves to be, with bad cases of organic disease.' I wrote that paragraph carefully from notes of actual cases ; I stick to every word of it ; and I hope that all who know of similar cases will communicate with me, so that I may add them to my list." l

This indictment is of considerable value, but the Christian Scientist might legitimately reply with as long a list of killed and wounded sent him by someone who knows the inner workings of the medical pro- fession, and is as unsympathetic to doctors as Dr Paget is to mental healers. The blind man cured by Christ would have been harshly handled by this critic. Dr Paget (saving his " orthodoxy ") would have first denied the cure, and failing that, the blind- ness, and failing everything, would have dismissed him as an ignorant creature who could not spell. On the other hand, it is only fair to admit that the

1 From a paper read by Dr Stephen Paget at the Swansea Church Congress, reported in the Guardian, I3th Oct. 1909.

4

50 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Lancet does often publish its failures and the Christian Science Sentinel never. The application of an abstract theory is sometimes very cruel, and the treatment by Christian Scientists in the case of certain children and others, who do not completely share their beliefs, is sometimes disastrous. There must also be taken into account the anguish of mind on the part of those who have given in their sub- mission to Science and Health, and, finding themselves still uncured, begin to believe that they are absolutely forsaken of God. On the other side of the ledger must be put the encouragement by Christian Science of healthy-mindedness, the invigorating truth in the persistent statement, even if it be exaggerated, that disease and premature death are against the will of of God. In so far as Christian Scientists have dis- couraged talk about ailments, and symptoms, and fussing about food, they have been a means of health and mental rest to our devil-ridden, decadent, modern world, and especially to that richer portion of it which habitually over-eats and under-works itself.

Granted, then, that Christian Scientists cure certain cases of disease, can we further admit their deduction that the cures prove the truth of their religious theory? Surely they would never have advanced this conten- tion if they had considered where it would lead us. They cannot deny that drugs have been known to cure diseases. Do they, then, approve the theory of drugs ? Hypnotism has undoubtedly cured diseases, do they then approve the mesmeric theory? Lourdes has had its well-attested cures, do they, then, approve

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 51

the Catholic theory ? Bethshan can show a long list of cures, do they, then, approve the Evangelical theory ?

The evidence in Court in the Harness Electric Belt case was conclusive as to the Harness cures, do they then admit the electrical theory? And if they point to this very Harness case, and remind us that there was no electricity in the belts, and suggest triumphantly that it was the patient's faith that healed him, we would ask them : What was the object in which the patient believed ? Was it Dr Harness, or electricity ? It was most assuredly not the Allness of God or the potency of Mrs Eddy's book. Grant, for the sake of argument, what in fact and reality cannot for a moment be granted, namely, that even in the case of the drug it is solely the patient's faith in that drug that cures, Christian Science is as far as ever from establishing its point, namely, that its own particular successes prove the truth of its own peculiar philosophy. So far, we have found considerable evidence for believing that which it holds in common with innumerable other faiths and systems, i.e. the potency of mind or spirit as a factor in medicine, and not one shred of evidence for believing that which is peculiar to itself, that which constitutes it Christian Science at all, namely, the non-existence of evil and disease, and, moreover, the non-existence of things visible, audible, and tangible.

It may be that some minds who are under the hysterical dominion of disease must be shocked out of that dominion by the exaggerated and violent appeal of Christian Science, but we doubt whether

52 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

such a deliberate disproportioning of the truth can, in the long run, continue without its revenges.

Christian Scientists must really settle what they do mean. For the present, we must take them to mean that men and women and all living beings exist as a spiritual manifestation of God ; while the external, visible, tangible bodies of these beings have no existence, and that therefore the acts of man's body — ploughing, walking, writing, eating — are as purely imaginary as is the act of poisoning his food with which the lunatic charges his warder. They obviously do mean this, for Mrs Eddy tells us that, when we have overcome error, we shall propagate our kind without the union of male and female, and shall live without eating. But we must insist to the point of weariness that, if this is so, bodily disease is no more unreal than bodily health, and that carbonate of soda is no more unreal than a certain tangible and visible and purchasable book called Science and Health. In this case the war against drugs must have an end, for if they assert that man's body, being matter, has no existence, they must also assert that the body of a dock leaf or of a peppermint plant, being matter, has no existence. And on the perfectly sound, practical, and philosophic principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, one might set an imaginary drug to cast out an imaginary disease. I do not care in the very least whether matter is existent or non-existent. For all I know it may be a very foolish abstract term. What I demand of Christian Scientists is that they should tell me whether my body exists and the bodies of my friends, and the visible world, with its storms and

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 53

sunsets ? I want further to know whether peppermint exists, whether oil exists, and corn, and wine, and cinnamon, and the leaves of the eucalyptus tree ? Are they as fantasmal as the diseases they allay and the bodies to which they are applied ? Is sleepiness as non-existent as sleeplessness, a good digestion as fantastical as a bad one? Is fecundity an unreal nightmare like sterility? Does nothing really exist excepting God — and perhaps mammon ?

In Science and Health I am taught that all things cognisable by the senses are illusions and have no real existence. This, I suppose, answers the foregoing questions in the dismal negative.

Mr Frederick Dixon asserts 1 that I have completely failed to grasp the teachings of Christian Science. I do not understand that " All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation." He then goes on to tell us once more that matter cannot therefore exist. This is quite uninteresting to me. What I want him now to tell me is, whether he himself does or does not exist, as a deduction from this All-Mind theory. My senses tell me that he does; but Mrs Eddy tells me that if my senses tell me he does, he certainly does not.

Take the act of eating an egg. Does Mrs Eddy deny the individuality of the eater, or the act of eating, or the reality of the egg ?

I know that, as a good Christian Scientist, when my sense of smell registers a bad egg, that is all moon- shine ; but when my senses register an egg at all, is that all mortal mind, or animal magnetism ? For in

1 Health Record, May 1908.

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Christian Science every illusion, every sin, every sickness is due to animal magnetism, and animal magnetism is mortal mind, so that old serpent, the Devil, has crawled back again, this time, into Mrs Eddy's little Eden, and once more we are faced with the old difficulties. True, the Christian Faith has them too, but then the Christian Faith does not pro- fess to explain all mysteries. Let us see how far we have travelled.

All is mind and all is God. Sin, disease, and death must be delusions, nor can they have real existence. But of what are they the delusions? For if all is mind and mind is God, they can hardly be the delusions of God. No, says Mrs Eddy, they are the delusions, not of mind, but of mortal mind. But if there be such a thing as mortal mind and mortal mind is not God, how can all be God ? Whence is mortal mind derived ? Is it derived from mind, which is God ? But Mrs Eddy tells us that God, or pure mind, can have no delusions. If mortal mind exists, it cannot, according to Christian Science, have delu- sions. If it does not exist, it is itself a delusion. Therefore, that which produces the delusion, is itself delusion. The delusion produced is the outcome of a producing delusion. Of what, then, is the non- existent mortal mind a delusion? It must be a delusion of All-Mind or God-Mind, which we are assured has no delusions.

Mrs Eddy joins in the popular outcry against creeds, but anything more dogmatic than her ideas would be hard to find in the whole range of history. It is indeed this assumption of finality that is so dear

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 55

to the man in the street who wants his thinking done for him and is prepared to purchase infallibility at a good price.

Worship, not criticism, is the order of the day, Christian Scientists are not generally students ; they are conventional folk, who have grown profoundly dissatisfied with the Christianity of the last century, and are yet unable to free themselves from it, unable to reconstruct a faith for themselves. For the most part, they belong to the comparatively idle classes. True, certain poor people — principally servants — have been treated without charge, by Christian Scientist healers ; but, on the whole, the poor have not had the gospel preached to them, nor have the common people heard it gladly. Christian Scientist churches are attended by just those classes of people who, by living on the labour of others, have plenty of leisure for introspective fussing about their little ailments. Love and a great many other abstract virtues with capital letters make up their creed, and they hail with joy a gospel which will help them not to worry about their sins nor about the slums, which will enable them to keep cool and comfortable, and which will cure them of their smaller ills. The new thought may have been expressed more wisely elsewhere than in the pages of Science and Health. They know nothing of that. It is through Mrs Eddy's book they have "got religion," and Mrs Eddy says there is no other book like it in the world, and they believe her.

There is one other point in Christian Science which I fear I shall never understand. If the senses of

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hearing, and seeing, and feeling are illusory, and register nothing but lies, how is it that the Christian Science healers are never tired of telling us of the marvellous cures in cases of deafness, blindness, and paralysis that God has effected through them ? How mysterious are the ways of the Almighty, in restoring to mankind, through the mediumship of Mrs Eddy, the use of those sensory organs, which are in them- selves the great evil, and can register nothing but delusion ! But there, we must leave all this to the all- wisdom of the all-mother, for has she not herself told us that unless we become as children, we cannot under- stand her ? Sometimes I think that, when that happy though childish consummation is effected, we may still find her a little difficult to follow.

POPULAR DETERMINISM AND MR BLATCHFORD

The question at issue — Man's existence at stake — The meaning of man — A little lower than the dogs — Response and responsibility — Unconditioned freedom not held by the Church — The three factors — The importance of instinct — From Philip drunk to Philip sober — Blatchford the sentimentalist — Determinism and punishment — Pity and patronage — Blatchford a decadent Christian — Blatchford and Calvin — Evil enthroned as God — Buddhist despair.

POPULAR DETERMINISM AND MR BLATCHFORD

THE question at issue between determinists and their opponents is not so much the question of man's free-will as of man himself; his very existence is at stake, his existence not as steam-engine, nor cabbage, nor as adder, nor as chessman, but as man.

The terms will, emotion, reason, do not stand for so many separate and distinct entities, nor does man possess will as a child possesses a box of paints. All these terms are but convenient signs that we have invented to express the mysterious activities of that mysterious human being who lurks behind them. They are terms invented to sum up the results of our observation of how man feels and thinks and acts. They are terms invented to express a supreme fact, namely, the discovery that a certain being differs from other beings, in that he possesses initiative which they do not possess, or more accurately, in that he possesses in a high degree an initiative which they possess in low degree, an initiative, moreover, which mechanical things do not possess at all. This large difference between certain beings and certain other beings, this total difference between certain beings and machines,

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we put into words. The being possessed of a high degree of initiative we call man. The three letters, M, A, N, mean a being with initiative, volition, power of self-analysis. To deny the existence of such a being is to empty those three letters of all significance. God made man a little lower than the angels. Blatchford makes him a little lower than the dogs ; in point of fact, he abolishes him altogether by abolishing his distinctive characteristics.

God's omniscience and man's volition present difficulties. The difficulties are not invented by theology. The difficulties are inherent in the facts of life. The problem of evil is not solved by shifting the responsibility from creature to Creator, for, difficult as it is to understand the rationale of evil in the creature, it is a thousand-fold more difficult to understand the rationale of evil in the fountain-head of being itself. My grievance against popular free-willers and popular determinists is that they do not even see the difficulties. They attempt to solve them by ignoring them. They leave out all the lines and shadows. We ask for a portrait, and they give us an oleograph. What I would now ask Mr Blatchford to give us is some definition of man which will distinguish him from sub-human creatures.

The fact is, Robert Blatchford did not originally care two straws about the philosophic question of free-will versus determinism, but did care consum- mately for the bottom dogs, and by the bottom dogs he at first meant the outcasts and the oppressed. Mr Alexander Webster writes of his humanity : " It enthralls him so completely that he has no mind for

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anything else. He is obsessed by humanity, has such sympathy with it, and is so tender over it, that he cannot permit any depreciation, scorn, or maltreat- ment of it. He is an enthusiast for the lowest. He carries the Bottom Dog in his arms." Small blame to him that his determinism is no abstract intellectual theory. He argues : " Men blame and punish these poor wretches ; but they are not responsible for their acts," and, in order to ensure their immunity from blame, he suggests the theory that no one is responsible for his acts. No one should ever be praised for anything, nor blamed for anything ; we are but pawns and knights and ivory kings and queens on the chessboard of a capricious Player. What greater depreciation of man than this is imaginable, what more abysmal contempt of one's kind ? One does not blame a jelly- fish for stinging, nor a stone for tripping one up; if one did, one would get no response. A dog, an ape, or an elephant responds to blame or praise in some degree. Man and woman respond in far greater degree. The dog is differentiated from the stone by the measure of its response to praise or blame. The man is differentiated from the dog by this greater capacity for response. The inventors of language have created a short term for this capacity to respond. The term is responsibility. In denying responsibility to man, Mr Blatchford denies to man his ability to respond. No creature, therefore, according to Mr Blatchford, since the beginning of the world, has ever responded to praise or blame, nor to the end of time could ever do so.

It will perhaps now be seen that the question is

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not one of Mr Blatchford's theory versus the theory of the Catholic Church, but of Mr Blatchford's theory versus the facts of the Catholic Church, the language of the dictionaries, and the universal experience of mankind.

Mr Blatchford may reply : " Granted that uni- versal experience is against human irresponsibility, it is, at least, as much against unconditioned human freedom." The reply is, of course, unanswerable ; but then no Catholic theologian of any age or country has ever taught the unconditioned freedom of human volition. On the contrary, the Church has explicitly and deliberately (will the determinists forgive the use of a word necessarily obliterated from their vocabu- lary ?) condemned free-will, as defined and attacked in the Clarion, as a damnable superstition.

The Church's teaching may perhaps best be ex- pressed by way of analogy. Suppose a man with an hereditary lameness is making towards a given spot, and, to get there, is obliged to climb a fence. The free-will school of thought deny the hereditary lame- ness and the environing fence. The determinist school of thought deny the man who wills to overcome them. A third school of thought, the traditional Catholic or orthodox Christian school, deny neither the man's will nor the conditioning factors of fence and lameness.

The Church teaches and has always taught that man possesses initiative, but that human volition is at first embryonic and is to some extent — but not wholly — conditioned by heredity and environment. It is in- disputable that man feels responsibility, and feels

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also that the circumstances of his ancestry, and of his surroundings, modify, while they do not obliterate, that responsibility. Which is more likely to be true, the threefold instinct of mankind, or the twofold opinion of Mr Robert Blatchford ?

But, say the determinists, " We reject instinct ; we will not for one moment accept evidence adduced from what you call fundamental human instincts." Some years ago I dipped into this controversy with an appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, asking determinists the following question : " If man has no initiative and no responsibility, how account for Philip, who, sober at midday and drunk at midnight, next morning instinctively feels that he was less master of himself at midnight than at midday ? He believes himself to have had no control at midnight, but some small power of control at midday. He believes himself not to have used that embryonic power he might have used. He is dissatisfied, miser- able, and determines to try again." Now, would Mr Blatchford tell him that his feeling of degradation was silly, as the act of filling himself with beer was as little his own responsible act as was the jug's at the counter when the barman filled it with the same liquid? Would Mr Blatchford tell him that he was equally irresponsible at midday and midnight, equally the sport of Fate at both periods ? Would he tell him : " The jug has no repentance, why then repent ? One can never be master of oneself, for there is no such thing as mastering self? One can never respond to praise or reproaches, for there is no such thing as responsibility ? " What would he tell him ?

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If the wretched man replied : " But I feel I can do better if I try," Mr Blatchford answers: "My poor fellow, you cannot try, unless you are driven by some power entirely beyond your own control." l Thus Mr Blatchford takes the bottom dogs into his arms, or such of them as he can catch, and in the innocence of his heart inoculates them with his morphinist doctrine and lays them tenderly down on the threshold of hell.

The Clarion's answer was as follows : " Philip's instinct of responsibility was as entirely illusory as the one-time instinct of men, to the effect that the earth was flat" This " argument " is made to do service over and over again, and is, in fact, the centre pillar of the determinist position. It is very doubtful, how- ever, whether the former opinion about the earth's shape can be classed with fundamental instincts. It is not an instinct, but a theory based on insufficient observation. An opinion about the geography of the earth can hardly be placed alongside of such funda- mental feelings as the desire for praise and the con- sciousness of wrong-doing. Mr Blatchford himself apparently admits this, for he couples the desire for

1 The determinist sometimes answers: "Philip does not really determine to do better ; he is simply driven to do better by the tyranny of desire — the desire for amendment conquering for the moment the desire for drink. But Philip is not an unreal abstraction and his desires the reality, but his desires are merely the unreal though useful lines of latitude and longitude drawn across the map of his mysterious personality. "Out of the whole mass of motives existing in each particular case, the Self — the fact which, according to Spencer, is to each beyond all others most certain — has the power of attending to some, to the neglect of others, and the strengthening of those attended to ; and moreover by the faculties of memory and deliberation we are enabled, not only to attend to one of, or select between a number of motives, but to create motives of our own," p. 51, Anti-A'unqttam, Warschauer, 5th edition.

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the approbation of one's fellow-creatures with the love of children and the love of adventure ; but in that case one hardly sees why, if the feeling of remorse and the desire of praise are to be dismissed as the ravings of a maniac, on what showing the love of one's kind and the love of adventure should be retained as admirable. What now becomes of the instinct of pity for the bottom dog which led the unfortunate determinists into this controversy ?

I have suggested that it was instinct and not reason that was responsible for Mr Blatchford's book. This suggestion was confirmed by a study of his treatment of the problem of prisons and punishment. Every reformer is conscious of the futility of our present system, and sets his face against vindictive punish- ments. Every humanist knows that society is more guilty than the outcast, and that the downtrodden are to a large extent the victims of our common stupidity and cruelty. But Mr Blatchford goes far beyond this ; his riotous sense of pity obliterates every other consideration ; for him, the abuse of a thing always takes away the use. Having once secured, as he imagines, his doctrine of irresponsibility, he now begins to apply it in every direction. It is by his application of it that his true motives are made apparent. Having repudiated instinct, he still allows himself to be swayed by this unrestrained instinct for pity, and triumphantly exclaims: "If no man is responsible for his acts, no man can be punished for his acts." Is this not a frank abandonment of reason and the enthronement of unrestrained sentiment? For the more learned and cautious determinists have

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always perceived that punishment can be defended on the fatalist theory that, if man cannot help sinning, society cannot help punishing. Or again, punishment is merely the modification, and prison the alteration, of a man's environment. On the determinist hypothesis, that man is merely machinery, prison grooves for men are at least as defensible as rails for trains. So, having reduced man to the level of wood and steel and iron, in order to show him irresponsible, unblameworthy, and unpunishable, Mr Blatchford is faced with the fact that these materials are drilled, imprisoned, and regimented in every conceivable direction, are cut and slashed and melted and beaten into shape in the relentless workshop and at the flaming forge.

The root of the popular determinists" error is the substitution of sentimentality for sentiment, and sentimentality may be defined as the riot of the feelings unchecked by reason or the monomaniacal exaltation of one sentiment to the degradation of all the rest. If we contend against the present defence of the bottom dog, it is not because we underrate the importance of defending him, nor undervalue the large-heartedness of his defender, but because we are assured that his particular theory is no defence at all. Pity is unwholesome stuff until it be admixed with other ingredients. Wholesale pity is first cousin to patronage, and there are few dogs so abysmally gone under as to prefer patronage even to blows and starvation.

The under dog will not always care to be told that he cannot possibly get up until those twin monsters,

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heredity and environment, cease mauling him. It may be that a hard and cruel philosophy drives men to overvalue the things it will not tolerate, that the cruel philosophy of a tyrant God and reprobate man and everlasting torment has driven men in revolt against its austerity to overvalue mercy, pity, good- nature, and love — not, indeed, such a love as many waters cannot quench, for that is stern and terrible, but the thing that modern people call love.

Is not Mr Blatchford's revolt but part of the modern Christian world's revolt? How seldom one hears a sermon about hell ! How sugary is the heaven of Hymns Ancient and Modern\ How insistent is the modern pulpit on the virtues of toleration and non- resistance ! How universal the phrase about hating the sin and loving the sinner ! The Christ who is moved with indignation, who thunders against scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who denounces the king as " that fox," who is rude to the rich and flogs the money-changers, the Christ who cried, " I come not to bring peace but a sword ! " the Christ who, because He is an incarnation of Divine Love, is also an incar- nation of Divine Wrath, the modern Christian world has crucified Him. Its drawing-rooms, I cannot say ring with the shout, but echo with the lady-like whisper, "Not this man, but Barabbas." Now, Barabbas is a gentleman. There was once a Christian Religion of men and women. We have replaced it with a Christianity for gentlewomen ; love has become sickly altruism, and " Blessed are the poor in spirit " has been turned into " Blessed are the poor-spirited." In exaggeration of protest against this exaggeration

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arises Nietzsche, who attacks the modern Christ for his mildness, while Blatchford is attacking the ancient Christ for his wrath. ,The modern Christian condemns the outspoken criticisms of Blatchford, but essentially he approves the sentiment behind them. If Blatch- ford were a Christian, would he not worship just such a Christ as is depicted in the stained-glass window, the plaster cast, and the pious booklet ? He condemns Christian inconsistency of action, but he also is in the sentimental stream of modern Christianity, and con- ventional Christianity is the decadent heresy of which the orthodox Traditional Faith is the truth.

It is intensely significant that Mr Blatchford had, on his own confession, several alternatives before him — either there was no God; or God was unknowable; or there was a God, good but impotent ; or there was an all-powerful God who had created men and was therefore responsible for their acts. Why has he chosen the latter alternative? Is it because the instinct of responsibility is so natural and human and persistent that even the determinists are compelled to retain some sort of Being for the purpose of their praise or blame ?

Mr Blatchford has been called a Calvinist, and he would be the first to admit the likeness of himself to Calvin, in that he believes in an Almighty Being who creates, and determines, and predestinates; but he would indignantly repudiate the term in that he is prepared to fight the Mighty Tyrant with whose judgments Calvin was well pleased. Such sentiment again does credit to his heart rather than his head ; the wheel has come round full circle, the popular

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determinists set out to solve the mystery of evil by the gospel of the gay irresponsibility of mankind ; the world was to be made merry and glorious by cleansing it from its dark beliefs and ghostly super- stitions. And, in place of these contemptible Christian imaginings, they have enshrined cruelty in the Central Life from which we draw our life, have darkened the world with the shadow of Almighty Evil, have fouled the well-springs of every creature's energy and ex- istence. We begin to understand Mr Blatchford's preference for Buddhism over the Christian Faith. Holding such a philosophy of despair as he holds, existence itself must have come to mean for him the supreme evil. The Nirvana of determinists must be complete annihilation.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM

dead controversy — Reason versus rationalism — Natural law — Ethical and Labour churches — Positivism — The case of Mr George Bernard Shaw — Rationalist ethics — Spurious holiness — Failure of the secularist movement.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM

THE subject of rationalism recalls to the mind a controversy long since dead, which raged round the question of miracles. Our immediate forefathers seemed to have thought that those significant and supernormal acts recorded in the New Testament were wrought by the Christ in order to prove that He was God. They seem to have argued that He broke the law of nature every now and then in order to impress unbelievers and drive them by a sort of tour de force into His fold. On this showing, the more unbelieving the neighbourhood, the more important would it have been for Him to terrorise them with such displays ; but we are expressly told that, in His own native country, " He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief." When people sought for signs He refused to work them, and taught that there were certain types of mind which would not be convinced, "though one rose from the dead." The New Testament itself almost invariably avoids the Greek term for miracle or wonder-work. The rationalists replied by denying the possibility of any break in the laws of nature, and, in consequence, the accuracy of the New Testament reports. But all sorts

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of things have been happening since the days of this nineteenth-century controversy. We no longer insist on the verbal accuracy of each separate passage of Scripture, although we believe that Scripture does, on the whole, give us a true portrait of the Christ and of the kind of things that He did. Then, again, we have discovered that all this talk about breaking laws of nature is nonsensical, for the " laws of nature " is only a term for our observation of what actually happens. If the physical resurrection, or the Virgin Birth, or the raising of Lazarus, actually happened, they happened not as contradictions of some fixed and unalterable law, but as exceptional illustrations of those mysterious workings of nature which men so little comprehend. If proof is forthcoming for these things, we must widen our view of nature so as to include them. We are becoming daily more healthily agnostic in matters of detail. Physical scientists are more willing to admit the limitations of their know- ledge and to consider it possible that there may be more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of by nineteenth-century dreamers. The study of tele- pathy, the latest theories about matter conceived as force, the enormous collection of facts about appear- ances at the moment of death, the growing scientific conviction of the influence of mind over body, all these things have changed the face of scientific philosophy and have made men more willing to believe that there is considerable substratum of truth in the New Testament record of so-called miracles.

On the other hand, we do not feel that miraculous power is the final proof of divinity. The mere

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possession of super-normal power does not constitute a man divine ; but that Christ, having this power to an extraordinary degree, should have used it always divinely, showing His almighty power most chiefly in mercy and pity, that does strike us as divine. The more alert, therefore, among both Christians and rationalists have abandoned the ground upon which that particular battle was fought, and the war now rages round more important positions.

The Rationalist Press prospectus describes rational- ism as " a mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason, and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experi- ence and independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority." In what sense is the term "reason" used? In what field is it supreme — in that of con- templation, or of action, or of both ? What kind of experience is meant ? Would emotional experience be counted? Is not all human experience, strictly speaking, emotional ? What is an arbitrary assumption of authority? As a matter of fact, we divide man up into innumerable parts — reason, will, emotions, etc. — and very possibly none of them have any more reality than the lines of latitude and longitude on the map. The term " reason " is a fairly convenient symbol for some dimly apprehended aspect of man. All these expressions are shadows, and behind the shadows lurks a being, mysterious, incomprehensible, unfathom- able, and the name of that being is man. If one could only persuade the rationalists to be a little less agnostic about God and a little more agnostic about man !

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The reasoning faculty has been defined in bewilder- ingly different ways by a multitude of experts. " Reason," as commonly understood, would seem to mean the power of analysis, the power of putting two and two together, and further, of making certain deductions from knowledge thus gained. Do rationalists seriously want us to believe in the supremacy of this power? Do they think it a more potent or important force in man's make-up than the power of the affections. Colonel Ingersoll used to give as an example of the futility of a mere reward and punishment religion the case of a man drowning and the crowd on the bank. He asked what would be the motive force that would impel the rescuer to plunge in ? He rightly dismissed the idea that anyone would risk his life on calculation of a future hell if he drew back or a future heaven if he plunged. Man is not such a calculating animal as that. While he was calculating the man would have gone under ; but this applies with equal force to the calculations of the analytical reason. The only power, as Ingersoll himself pointed out, that could with any certainty be counted on in this instance was the power of the affections, which seems to be a conclusion eminently in harmony with the dogma " God is love," and eminently out of harmony with the dogma "Reason is supreme" — unless, indeed, rationalists include the affections under the term " reason," which would be a slipshod arrangement of which they are apparently not guilty, for they speak of the emotions as only safe forces when controlled by reason.

What a pity that rationalists should not acquaint

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themselves with the teaching of the Christian religion on the subject of sin ! Throughout the work one feels they cannot disentangle themselves from the atmosphere of the Sunday School they had the misfortune to attend as boys. Perhaps they were taught in class the missionary hymn which announces that every prospect pleases, and only man is vile. Now, that is emphatically not the teaching of the Christian Church, the orthodox doctrine being that human nature is essentially good, however much it may be buried underneath the rubbish of ignorance and evil. Man is not fundamentally vile, though he often behaves vilely.

Rationalists are perpetually telling us they cannot believe certain things to have happened, because they would not be "in accordance with natural law." In The Meaning of Rationalism, Mr Charles Watts insists that " it must be shown . . . that the outlines of Christ's life are consistent and in accordance with natural law? If it is unfortunate that the opponents of the Faith do not trouble to acquaint themselves with the A B C of the Christian position, it is even more lamentable that these self-elected champions of science should show themselves completely ignorant of the A B C of physical science.

Science knows absolutely nothing of this absolutism of " natural law," as Professor Huxley endeavoured to teach the simple bishops of his day. The sole question to be asked of any alleged occurrence is : " What is the evidence for it?" If the evidence is good and it seems really to have happened, then it must be accepted and becomes part and parcel of so-called " natural law."

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The law simply means our observation of phenomena, our mental note about things that happen. If, for instance, the Virgin Birth could be proved, it would not contradict nature ; it would be nature ; it would be a new illustration of how nature sometimes works. This obsession by natural laws is obvious through- out the pages of The Rationalist Catechism, by Aletheia, M.D. The author tells us he was not created, for nothing that exists was created, for creation means " made suddenly from nothing." He continues : " Why cannot anything be made out of nothing ? " — and gives an unintelligible answer. Later on he speaks of the Ascension. It would be impossible for anyone living on this earth to ascend into the skies. " And Jesus could not have done this ? — No. Why ? — Because His body could not have resisted the law of gravitation." Not all rationalists are as ignorant and irrational as Aletheia. But none of them seem to be aware that a whole host of orthodox Catholic theologians would repudiate the ex nihilo theory. It is un- necessary to defend a literalist view of the Ascension, but could anything be less scientific than its denial on the ground that a human body cannot " resist the law of gravitation"? It is noticeable that rationalists express great contempt for Pagan philo- sophy. Aletheia tells us that the efficacy of prayer is nonsense because we have borrowed the idea from our Pagan ancestors. Worship is of no use at all, unless it be "admiration for the laws of nature." This is how our author defines rationalist philosophy. It is "completely unified knowledge of the manifesta-

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tion of the unknowable." Surely the philosophy should be re-christened irrationalism ?

The rationalists find fault with Christ's character. Christian Socialists claim Him as Socialist, individu- alists claim Him as individualist, spiritualists claim Him as spiritual regenerator, etc. So runs the argu- ment. Therefore, how small a man must He have been. To my simple mind, it must be confessed the argument points all the other way. If so many diverse people proclaim Him Lord, and find their satisfaction in Him, He is probably a complex and titanic personality. Mr Watts sees clearly two portraitures of Christ in the Gospels — " the one, for- giving, loving, sympathetic ; the other, gloomy and vengeful ; these two portraitures are diametrically opposed to each other." (!) What does our author mean by love? One suspects him of meaning a contemptibly weak benevolence, a watery kindness, which has nothing in common with that consuming passion which many waters cannot quench. He has yet to learn that great love is not incompatible with anger, and that the Supreme Lover must often be " moved with indignation."

Rationalist ethics are generally the ethics of non- conformity gone flat. There is seldom advanced in meetings of secular or ethical societies any original suggestion about morality. They have rejected, if ever they knew, the enthusiasm of theology for a flat-footed pursuit of morality considered as God. They have not thrown the ethical conceptions of Queen Victoria into the melting-pot. They do not attempt to trans-value the values of Upper Tooting.

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They neither re-interpret nor develop ethical tradition. Before they could be of any help to us they must learn that morality was made for man, not man for morality. At present their Sunday Services are like champagne with the cork out.

In vain does one flee from the ethical societies to positivist churches, from the worship of abstract good to the worship of abstract humanity. "All men know," writes Dr Stanton Coit, " at least sufficiently well for a starting-point, what goodness in human character is. But the idea of a personal Creator of the universe has baffled the speculative efforts of the best-disciplined and most philosophic minds." This may be so, but children and wayfaring men are excited about God and bored with " the good." Dr Coit believes that " the good " is the only bond of religious union, and that ethicist lecturers would induce men to remove all other qualifications for membership in churches, and that men driven away by dogmatic restraints " will immediately form themselves into societies for the spread of goodness." These societies, he thinks, will stand equal in dignity and power with Christ's con- ception of a Kingdom of God on earth. He believes that the adoration of the good comes to-day with all the freshness and vigour of a new revelation. So he writes in 1900; so he could hardly write in 1912. There is no such thing as goodness apart from people. To love goodness in the abstract is to love that which never has had, and never will have, any existence. That is why many leave secularist and ethical societies for the pursuit of positivism or the worship of humanity.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 81

But humanity has no more existence than the good. If it is difficult for a child — or, for the matter of that, a man — to love God and to love his neigh- bour as himself, he will not find it any easier to love humanity and the unknowable, even though the high priest of positivism explains humanity to him as the " permanent and collective power of the human organism." l

Humanity, according to the positivists, is to be known by science.2 " That is puzzling. Most of us know what we do of it by rocking-cradles, milk, kisses, fisticuffs, tears, winks, becks, nods, whistles, frowns, and such-like, not by science, unless every experiment is science and not only ordered things tied up in trusses."

There is, of course, a sense in which every reasoner might be called a rationalist, but secular societies do not like one so to name oneself unless one happens to arrive at the conclusion of secularist orthodoxy. Rationalism and atheism are terms interchangeable in many rationalist circles. The faithful would, for instance, exclude Mr Gilbert Chesterton, because by reason he has come to a conservative Catholic conclusion ; or myself, because by reason I have come to Catholic conclusions of another sort ; or Mr George Bernard Shaw, because he has free-thought himself into some kind of Theism. Atheist and agnostic rationalists have not contri- buted to the upbuilding of a modern ethic in this country, if we except the work of Mr Karl Pearson

1 The Philosophy of Common Sense, by Frederic Harrison.

2 C. L. Marson, Academy, 4th April 1908.

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and Mr Belfort Bax. Mr Pearson's criticism of Mr Arthur Balfour should be studied carefully by those who wish to gain some knowledge of agnostic rationalism at its best. But perhaps Mr Belfort Bax's Essays in Socialism are of equal interest, especially his chapter on " The Futility of Holiness," where he speaks of the current Christian morality as summed up in " neurotic introspection and mere self- sacrifice." These essays were, of course, penned some years ago. They are not good criticism of the casuistry of the day, and are ludicrously bad criticism of the casuistry of the Middle Ages. Their complaint can only be allowed as against Mid-Victorian Pro- testantism, and even the nineteenth century gave us Maurice, Robertson, Tennyson, and other Christian philosophers, with whose work Mr Bax should be acquainted. Mr Bax surely misreads " the Catholic saint." He is of opinion that the majority of mankind, while in theory adhering to the neurotic saintly ideal, were preserved by their healthy understanding, by the "blessed animal within them," from becoming "mere lumps of morbidity such as a St Anthony^ a St Bernard, or a St Teresa." There was, indeed, a morbid strain in Anthony and Teresa, but one must remember that there is an almost infinite variety of types in Catholic saintship, and that it was in spite of, and not because of, morbidity that the saints in question were canon- ised. It would be difficult to find anything neurotic in the visions of that most robust of martyrs, St Vibia Perpetua. St Catherine of Sienna would have shocked the agnostic drawing-rooms of to-day by an outspokenness which reminds one of Walt Whitman.

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I sometimes think we are saved by the saints but damned by their later biographers, and Mr Belfort Bax might justly complain of even the joyous St Francis of Assisi and his companion, if he had come across them for the first time in the distorting mirror of the fourteenth-century Fioretti. In this decadent account the saints are turned into spiritual ego-maniacs who brandished their humility in the face of the crowd. Christ warns you against pride. Imitate His humility. You have a preaching engagement in Rome and an admiring crowd is coming to meet you. Abase your- self; turn its admiration of you into scorn, let it pelt you with offal, while you see-saw with children. The Blessed Christ humbled Himself by playing with children. His Franciscan followers humiliated them- selves and played the fool with children. So reads this nasty little book. As if anybody was ever abased by see-sawing with urchins, except at the moment when his end touches the ground, and of that literal abasement it is irrefutably true that whosoever abases himself shall be exalted. The writers of the Fioretti seem to think that the early Franciscans invented some daring foolery of self-abasement in imitation of Christ and in caution of their immortal souls, but Christ did not consider His soul by considering the children. He simply considered children. But there is nothing of all this in the earlier lives of Francis. The people's nickname for the original Franciscans was "God's Jugglers." The nickname arose, not because they played the fool to humble themselves — they were saints, and saints find too much fun in loving other people to worry much about their own

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souls — but because it amused themselves and children and other good people, and scandalised religious prigs and other bad people. Our Lord's eating and drinking with sinners must equally have shocked the pious and amused Himself, and one can well imagine church-goers explaining it away in the interests of one of their idolatrous abstractions, holy obedience, holy humility, and the like. For, unfortunately, the Christian churches sometimes become as dull as positivist and ethical societies, and follow after the like abstractions. But the saints are different. The first Franciscans, and especially their leader, were moved to wrath at cruel sloth and laxity ; they were severe with themselves, not because they despised their bodies, but because they must keep themselves lithe and alert. They were full of laughter, and moved the people to merriment and to tears. To preach naked before prudes, or to spin like a top in a circle of dullards, or to play pranks upon the Pharisees, these are the acts of the Catholic saints. They are living illustrations of the humanism of Christ, and not mere imitators of the copy-book Christs of ethical societies, Christian or non-Christian. That title " God's Jugglers " should be remembered by Mr Belfort Bax. He should also remember the rollicking jollity of the Middle Ages, and the jests of the Acta Sanctorum, and the blessed Thomas More's last words to his judges, hoping they would all meet in God's merry heaven. He should remember also the rebuke of St Charles Borromeo to the pious brother who, horrified at the saint's devotion to billiards, asked : " What would you do if Our Lord were suddenly to

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come and find you at the billiard table?" "I should pray," answered Charles, " that my next stroke should be the best I had ever made."

Good, easy-going Mr Bax is stirred with the rest of us at the heroism of Port Royal, but even the later Roman Church, in spite of its neurotic prayers and hymns, condemns the Port Royalists for their asceticism carried to the point of heresy. The most characteristic of the Port Royalists is Saint-Cyran, whose creed may be summed up in the saying : " Act as if the world contained only yourself and God." All sensuous human impulses, generous and mean alike, are barred. He is confessor to the nuns, and tells them they must give up their little garden plots because to love a patch of private ground is ungodly. The pupils should always be taught the most dis- tasteful lessons, but must not be strained too far, for they are " too young to be spiritual." Mr Bax must remember that Rome condemns all this, and that its condemnation is well within the tradition of the Catholic Church and of the Gospel. We have yet to learn that Christ had been teaching the little child set in the midst the most distasteful lessons on the sands of Galilee, modifying them only when He remembered that it was too young to be spiritual. If children are saved, "converted" children are most assuredly damned.

Mr Belfort Bax will not be pleased to learn that in this criticism of introspection and inwardness he is preaching the true Christian ethic, but perhaps we may comfort him somewhat by putting him down as a Christian heretic, for his protest is too exaggerated

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for the orthodox proportion of faith. If the ascetic heretic regards pain for its own sake as valuable, the comfortable Mr Bax would seem to regard pleasure for its own sake as valuable, whereas Walt Whitman comes much nearer indexing the Christian position when he suggests that pain and pleasure may be alike good as leading unto life. But certainly the following question and answer in Bax's Catechism show him to be not far from the ethics of the Kingdom of God : —

" But are not the ethics of Socialism essentially altruistic ? If that is so, can you have any finer expression of them than is to be found in Christianity, e.g. in the Sermon on the Mount ?

" Socialist ethics are neither altruistic nor egoistic ; they are intrinsically neither selfish nor unselfish. As with other abstractions characterising the phase of human development generally called civilisation — such as the differentiation into separate and even antagonistic classes of the various social functions of labour and direction separated and embodied in the two antagonistic classes of master and servant — so in ethics we find a purely factitious antagonism set up between the individual and society. This antagonism is based to a large extent on the economic individualism which separates and antagonises the material interests of the individual with his neighbour and with society at large. Given this antagonism, it naturally becomes a virtue on the part of the individual to sacrifice himself morally for the benefit of others. Where, however, the condition is changed — and in proportion to the degree of this change — the reason for such a sacrifice disappears, and to that ex- tent it ceases to be a virtue. The virtue lies in the sacrifice rendered to one's neighbour or to society, not in the amount of injury to oneself: thus, it would be meritorious to rescue anyone from a burning building, even at the cost of personal suffering or of life itself, and it is difficult to con- ceive of any set of circumstances in which the reason for such an act might not obtain — but the good would be in

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the rescue, not in the suffering or sacrifice entailed. Loss, injury, or suffering is essentially an evil in itself, even if self-inflicted and for a good object. Socialism presupposes a condition of things in which the good of all will mean the good of each ; and a society so constituted that the indi- vidual cannot serve himself without serving society, and cannot injure society without injuring himself. Thus, there will no longer be altruism and egoism, selfishness and un- selfishness, existing as antagonistic abstractions, but selfish- ness and unselfishness must necessarily be alike social in the general run of conduct."

The secularist movement has been more than once mentioned in the chapter. This movement dates, in England, from about 1830, though the term itself appears somewhat later. Secularism is a theory of life which aims at developing man's physical, mental, and moral powers without dependence on the doctrines of God and a future life. It urges men to set their affections upon this world, making the best they can of the present life. By this, few if any secularists would understand " let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Not their bitterest enemies could accuse them of undue merriment. As a rule, secularists are at one with those Christians who teach that the material and sensuous life have their due importance for one's individual self, and that we should be anxious to secure those for others, and should remember that the body is more than raiment, and the whole man more than his physical needs. True self regard and public regard are not, in the long run, opposed, for the individual, by finding his proper place in an ordered society, gains the fuller life which comes of merging self in commonwealth. So far, secularists and Christians can travel together.

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But the secularist would concentrate his attention solely upon this present world, and, by ignoring theo- logical sanctions, fancies himself to have discovered an impetus which "supernatural religion" is unable to supply ; for, says he, " Secularism works from within, supernatural religion feebly appeals from without." " Secularism proposes to cultivate the splendid provinces of time, leaving theologians to care for the realms of eternity." What, on the other hand, is religion ? According to Mr Foote, it is " the knowledge of God, of His will, of our duties towards Him." We have faculties which teach us our "dependence on Him, our prospect of reward and punishment, to be somehow brought about according as we obey or disobey Him " (Newman). With such a religion secularists will have nothing to do, for theirs is a creed " which appeals to no lust after posthumous reward, or dread of posthumous punishment, but to that fraternal feeling which is the vital essence of all true religion and has prompted heroic self-sacrifice in all ages." Human work well done is its own reward. And if there be a future life, such work must be the best preparation for it (Foote, Gospel of Secularism, Religious Systems, Sonnenschein).

The same writer, himself an atheist, contends that secularism does not necessarily deny, but only ignores God and the future life. Many secularists are atheists; more, agnostics. Many, although they re- ject the " supernatural," profess to be the followers of Jesus Christ, whose image, along with others, adorns the Leicester Secularist Hall. Although secularists, like other folk, often become bigoted and narrow, the

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movement does, on the whole, stand for freedom of discussion. The Clarion opens its columns to its religious opponents, and a present bishop and a present archdeacon have been among the clergy of the Guild of St Matthew who have appeared as de- fenders of the Faith on secularist platforms. It should also be remembered that the Guild of St Matthew, whilst it carried on a vigorous intellectual campaign against Bradlaugh, was equally vigorous in champion- ing him against the persecutions of those who would have excluded him from the House of Commons and denied him a hearing.

Although "Bible Impossibilities," or some such subject, is usually chosen at secularists' meetings, the programme of a well-known " Hall of Science " has of late years included such subjects as " The Republics of Plato and of Christ," " Miracles," " Secular Education," " Political Economy," " Positivism," " Manners," " Co- partnership." Among the lecturers are Mr M'Cabe (late Father Anthony of the Franciscans), Mr G. W. Foote (editor of the Freethinker), Mr Sullivan, Mr F. C. Gould, and Mr J. M. Robertson, M.P.

Mr M'Cabe is their ablest advocate. He urges that London has morally improved while its church-going has enormously decreased. Japan is mainly secularist, and its morals are excellent. Paris is less criminal and less religious than formerly.1 France becomes more and more secularist, and its character rapidly benefits. Theological fiction depicts the harrowing deaths of shrieking secularists, but secularists die calmly after leading a " tolerably good life " without

1 These statements are, of course, disputed.

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any theological influence. They are "just easy-going citizens of average decency, keeping up a fair standard of character" (M'Cabe debate, "Independence of Ethics").

And, indeed, when we realise that the early secular- ists were not men who renounced the good God in order to lead a bad life, but men who renounced the bad God (of Calvinism, etc.) in order to lead a good life, we are not disposed to question Mr M'Cabe's contention. Besides, our religion would lead us to expect that the light that lighteth every man would inspire with partial good, movements even of negation and revolt

The secularist propaganda is not necessarily without the inspiration of God because its members choose to consider themselves godless. On the other hand, good constructive work is not built on mere denials, and we should not be surprised if " secularism " already begins to show signs of decay. Now, this is precisely what is happening.

In many respects the times are favourable to the propaganda. Mild doubts are the fashion and un- dogmatism the prevailing dogma. The unscrupulous criticisms of Mr J. M. Robertson and the scrupulous criticisms of Mr Joseph M'Cabe are widely read. The publications of the Rationalist Press have a large sale. Even the inverted Calvinism of my friend Mr Robert Blatchford secures a hearing. The secularist propa- ganda flourishes mightily, but the secularist societies for all this are beginning to leak. The Rationalist Press Annual for 1908 warns its readers that no move- ment can be permanently based on mere negation.

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Secularist audiences are weary of the " Mistakes of Moses," and tire of the everlasting ridicule of a theo- logy which is passing away as rapidly as it sprang up. They had renounced theology that there might be the more time to build a righteous republic here and now, and feel themselves cheated by lecturers who dwell upon the blunders of a God whose existence they deny, and the brutalities and blisses of a future life that they had resolved to ignore. Many are becoming converts to Socialism, and grow restive under the dead hand of middle-aged leaders whom negation has made too old at forty, Mr Gould resigns his secretaryship, not because he ceases to be a secularist but because he becomes too much of a secularist for the secularist societies, and finds that the more enthusiastic secular work is being done out- side the dismal Halls of Science. Few young men join, and the old men grow querulous. Mr George Bernard Shaw, that prince of freethinkers, begins to think too freely for the Freethinker, which is more enraged at his theistic conclusions than the Church Times is at his impertinent methods of expressing them. The leaders are in half a mind to give up reasoning, if reasoning is to lead men back to the Faith. Propagandists are deserting the destructive pseudo-secularism of their societies for the construc- tive secularism of the Social Democratic Party and the Church Socialist League. Many of them are working shoulder to shoulder with Churchmen for the building of God's Kingdom and the realisation of His will here on this earth. The propaganda was merely the negation of a negation, and is proving itself too

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slow-footed to keep pace with the development within the Church.

Of what use any longer are Mr Foote's ponderous contrasts between fraternal secularism and anti- fraternal next-worldliness ? He should be contrasting his creed with the creed of those who, while working for the good of the race, regard it not as " the trouble of ants in a million of suns," but as a God-penetrated race of divine and enduring beings, influencing one another for good or evil through this life and through all stages of the life to come. Men will put more heart into the building of castles on the rock than castles in the sand to be obliterated by the tide. A sad and paralysing pity for the creatures of an hour is the motive power of the secularist, and pity is but poor foundation for an enduring ethic.

The secularist propaganda is dying. What further proof is needed than may be found in the defences of its leaders ? For to say of a little flock who should be the salt of the earth, a minority in revolt, a band of young heroes, attracting to its standard the most vital and adventurous spirits of the age — to plead average decency and tolerably good living for such a minority is to admit defeat. Such pleas are for elephantine majorities, tamed and domesticated by time. Minorities, leading a "tolerably good life," if they were ever to become majorities, would be leading an intolerably bad life. But there is no spring and no enthusiasm in minorities of "average decency." They will never become majorities. They die and are buried, and for them there is no resurrection on the third day.

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS FOR ESCAPED ETHICISTS

Theosophic undenominationalism — To dogmatise or not to dogmatise ? — Wherein lies the essence of a religion ? — Buddhism versus the Christian Religion — Mrs Besant and Dr Pusey — Was Madame Blavatsky a charlatan ? — Mrs Besant's rival — Point Loma— The benefits of theosophy — Lettuces not lotuses.

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS FOR ESCAPED ETHICISTS

NOT the profession of a common belief, but a common search, is the bond of union between members of the Theosophical Society. So the "basis" informs us, and Mrs Besant has often told us that the Society would admit agnostics, and held no dogmas. Officially it describes itself as composed of students belonging to any religion or none. Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, Buddhists, are urged to remain in their respective communions, and by joining the theosophists to become more, not less, loyal to their respective creeds. A theosophic friend writes suggesting that I should make a great point of this creedlessness. So far as denial of creed concerns the society, it is sufficiently extraordinary, for I know of no single member who does not believe a whole body of Oriental dogmas, and who does not associate this belief with member- ship ; nor does the denial seem to tally with the following official statement : —

"The Theosophical Society is an international body which was founded on i;th November 1875. Its objects are: —

"First. — To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour.

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" Second. — To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science.

" Third. — To investigate the unexplained laws of nature, and the powers latent in man."

A declaration of sympathy with the above objects is required as a condition of membership, but such a declaration obviously involves belief in the dogma of Brotherhood, the dogma of Unity, the dogma of a Universal Order — three dogmas at the least ; and the student would not have attended half a dozen meet- ings without discovering that these were only certain articles of a creed far longer and more elaborate than the Athanasian, a creed as intellectual as the other so-called creed but without its damnatory clauses.

The theosophist would seem at one and the same time to regard the fear of creeds as the beginning of wisdom, and to hold an intricate faith to which Mrs Besant gives, and other theosophists deny, the name of religion.

Personally, I must confess that both my first and my mature impressions of theosophists suggest that there are few things in heaven and earth that are undreamt of in their philosophy.

In the face of the things I have quoted, and of the direct testimony of one of the officials of the Society, who said it existed to make known and advocate a certain system of philosophy (Henry T. Edge), the denial of dogma is puzzling. Such a denial, when applied, not to the Society, but to that system of theosophy it exists to promulgate, seems to me grotesque. This terror of dogma is characteristic of the Mid-Victorian age, in which the Society was

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founded, and into which a large portion of the " imperial race " is only just entering.

In reality the theosophist opposes not dogma, but certain dogmas. He is the product of a moral re- action against the immoral Victorian superstitions which masqueraded as Christianity ; against such dogmas as our relationship to a capricious tyrant, everlasting torment, the vileness of human nature, and the viciousness of physical science.

The theosophist, along with many another moral revolutionary, protested against this creed, and was especially revolted by its damnatory appendix. He refused to believe that opposition to vicious proposi- tions spelt future damnation ; but, in denying all dogmas and all damnation, instead of specific dogmas and specific damnation, he shows himself an ethical emotionalist rather than a philosopher. The strenuous denial of certain propositions implies certain counter beliefs, assumptions, dogmas, and implies as certainly the damnatory clause, for to believe a generous creed is to be saved, and to deny it is to be damned, t.e. shut out from the riches and fruitfulness of the present kingdom of life. There are certain fulgent beliefs which heal and save men, and death-like denials which warp and kill. It is the particular note of the modern decadent to shrink from proclaiming the fact that shrivelled anaemic souls are damned, and the theosophist should be the first to realise that one belief is not as good as another ; for, although he holds one man's meat another's poison, yet he believes in a common food of which all should partake, pre- facing his creed with the dogma that underlying Faiths

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the most varying is one Truth given for the sustenance of the sons of men, and that to accept it is life. What, then, is its rejection ?

The dislike of dogma resolves itself, then, into a confused protest against uncharitableness and against creeds imposed by questionable authorities, rigid and inflexible creeds, from which the life and meaning have departed. The Society has, nevertheless, at times come dangerously near to the obvious heresy that one belief is as good as another, and to the absurd predicament of the man in Lewis Carroll's essay, who, when asked which king he would serve, " Richard or William, speak or die ? " blurted out " Rilchiam ! " This is what Mr Carroll called a port- manteau word. Unkind critics might call theosophy a portmanteau religion.

According to theosophy, the essence of all religions lies in their likenesses and not in their distinctions. This is a most popular belief in our day, and no doubt it is a healthy revolt against Victorian Christianity, which believed itself in possession of the full light and all the rest of the world to lie in darkness.

There are, however, many writers in our time, notably the Abbe Loisy, who, in contradiction to the theosophic idea, would seem to suggest that the essence of the Christian Faith must lie in its points of difference from, and not in its points of agreement with, other religions. But surely the originality of any person does not depend on his being very different from, or very like to, some one else, but rather on a certain energy and individual vitality which he possesses. And this is true of the Christian Faith, or

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indeed of any other Faith. For instance, it holds with Hinduism a doctrine of universal brotherhood ; it holds against Hinduism a doctrine of the redemption and sweetness of the body and the sensuous life. Theo- sophy would find in the former doctrine its essence ; other schools of thought would point to the latter doctrine for its essence. In point of fact, the Christian religion holds many doctrines in common with other great religions of the world, and some doctrines distinct and peculiar to itself, and both the common and the peculiar are essential notes of its teaching.

Now, although theosophists do not advise converts to abandon their distinctive faiths, and even recom- mend attachment to some national religion, yet it is in the main true to say that theosophy sets too high a value upon " the same spirit " and too low a value on the "diversities of gifts."

Mrs Besant proclaims herself a convinced evolu- tionist, but somewhere or other she complains of the arrogance and exclusiveness of the Church's claims, on the ground that Christianity is the youngest of the world religions. Surely it is on account of this very youth and lateness that the Christian Faith, in the development of God's purpose, may be the heir of all the ages ?

" I forbid you to speak of your disbelief! I forbid you to lead into your own lost state, souls for whom Christ died ! " So Dr Pusey is alleged to have answered the doubts of Mrs Annie Besant, then a young and impressionable girl, whose heart was begin- ning to revolt against the bibliolatry of the Evangelical

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and Puseyite Schools. Had Mrs Besant taken her difficulties to either Newman or Maurice, who, though opposed to each other in many things, had yet each of them a Catholic outlook, instead of applying to a patristic pedant, the whole subsequent course of her life might have been changed.

Wherein lay the attraction of theosophy for Mrs Besant and thousands of modern minds ?

Dissatisfied with the popular presentation of Christianity — of its real thought they were sublimely ignorant (Christians either accept the parody of their Faith or reject it : the one thing they refuse to do is to study their own traditions and authorities) — dissatisfied with a religion which opposed science and outraged morals, they turned to " freethought," which was not free from prejudices nor thoughtful enough to admit the existence of psychological problems or psychic phenomena, and which contemptuously dismissed the instinct for future life and behaved in most unscientific fashion. Suffering from a two-fold disillusionment, these people were on the look-out for a philosophy which would recognise human instinct, reconcile religion and science, and explain the mysteries of existence. Just in the nick of time there appears upon the scene a brilliant cosmopolitan prophetess with her " secret doctrine," ready to supply this long-felt want.

Madame Blavatsky was no vulgar fraud, but a complex and fascinating figure who, possessing an effective though somewhat shallow knowledge of Oriental thought, was able to popularise it just at the psychological moment among Westerns, who never read their own philosophers and are under the spell

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of that great Eastern delusion that action belongs to the West and thought to the East.

On the side of Madame was also the fact that she partly believed in her own creed and entirely believed in herself. It is very difficult to determine to what extent Madame Blavatsky possessed occult or supra- normal powers ; but, having examined the evidence for and against her, I have been forced to the conclusion that on many occasions she resorted to trickery of the most unblushing character. Devotees never read the case against their idol. It is a point of honour with them ; but the infantine faith of Madame's disciples is almost Christian Science-like in its completeness. Mrs Besant, for instance, whose cleverness in certain directions is only paralleled by her credulity in others, on being told by Madame Blavatsky of the charges brought against her, exclaimed that she had only to look into Madame's eyes to know that they were false. Theosophy seemed at one time to be booming as faith-healing is booming to-day, and Madame Blavatsky satisfied the Western craving for authority and excitement by the invention of a body of mahatmas or masters who, from their remote habitation in the desert of Gobi, or the Himalayan hills, had ordered her to reveal sacred truths to a world which was certainly " prepared " to receive them.

There are nowadays members of the Theosophic Society who attach no value to the tnahatmic theory, and I am informed by one of them that the President of the British Section is not in agreement with Mrs Besant on this subject. But there can be no doubt that Madame Blavatsky introduced the masters as an

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essential part of the theosophic scheme, and that Mrs Besant herself regards their existence as all-important. She would not wish to impose a belief of this sort upon her fellow-members as " of faith," but none the less is herself quite dogmatic upon the point.

The theory of reincarnation is also an all-important one with members of the Society, and I know of no theosophist who does not hold it or believe it to be of considerable importance. Some years ago I had a conversation with Mrs Besant on the subject, and suggested to her that her lectures sometimes gave the impression that she considered it of equal importance to believe that persons were reincarnated upon this earth, as to believe that the state of men after death was not static and fixed, but that there was possibility of progress or retrogression beyond the grave. From her answer I did not gather that she appreciated the difference between the husk and the kernel of such doctrines. She speaks with equal vehemence and emphasis of the letter of the dogmas she believes and of their spirit. And, as theosophy was in part a protest against inert literalism in religion, this attitude of hers will seem unfortunate. To believe in progres- sion beyond death is one thing; to believe that it actually takes place upon this particular planet is another. The first belief is concerned with a question of truth ; the second with a question of fact The first may be true as a fairy-tale is true ; the second may be true as Bradshaw's Railway Guide is true. It has always seemed extraordinary to me that Mrs Besant of all people should not exalt Grimm above Bradshaw. I have heard many theosophists emphasise the sup-

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posed fact of a curtain ring flying from off its pole and encircling the wrist of a sitter, with the same vehemence with which they would tell us that God is love and that with Him there is no darkness at all. Of course they will deny this and be very angry, or, rather, very " grieved " at the imputation. But it is nevertheless a fact that can be attested by their speeches and their writings.

Many of them have been charged with holding Manichaean beliefs about the body, but Mrs Besant, at least, cannot be criticised adversely upon this point. She would seem to realise the essential value of the physical senses, and to believe not in their suppression but in their control by the spirit. But the study of Oriental literature, and the reverence in which it is held, tends undoubtedly to contempt of the body and the physical senses as mere sheaths which are ulti- mately to be cast aside as encumbrances. I have found theosophists to take great interest in the sub- ject of spiritual healing, and to hold for the most part much more scientific beliefs on this subject than Christian Scientists. Some of their members have themselves demonstrated the power of the mind to mould the body with considerable success.

The theosophists, unlike the rationalists in almost every particular, have this in common with them, that they do not seem to have contributed anything to what may be called the Science of Morals. I remember with what eagerness one used to listen to theosophic lectures couched in strange and intricate terminology, and invariably discovered that one's mind had been led the wildest wild-goose chase, and that

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though the voice was the voice of Blavatsky, the hands were the hands of our next-door neighbour, the local preacher of Salem Chapel. Theosophic ethics are like Cornish pilchards. Both are sent to far- distant countries to receive a hall-mark and to return. They do not improve in the barrel

It is the insistence of theosophists on the sameness of religion throughout the world, and their too little appreciation of individuality and distinction, that im- pressed us in the first place and still impresses us. So essential a feature of their religious outlook is it that they apply it in every branch of thought and use it as a talisman of criticism in dealing with the most various subjects. For instance, Mrs Besant joins in the fray that is now raging round the phrase " Jesus or Christ," and, in criticising the views put forward by various writers in the Hibbert Journal, adds a sugges- tion of her own. Thinking from the theosophic standpoint, she believes it likely that a human being called Jesus was for thirty years humbly receptive of truths communicated to Him by a great and universal Teacher ; but that, at the descent of the Holy Ghost in the baptism by John, Jesus of Nazareth retired from His body and gave it up to a Heavenly Christ who henceforth used it as the vehicle through which He gave a new revelation to the race. She admits that this theory was ultimately condemned by the Church, but is of opinion that it was orthodox theology until it was condemned. I do not think this view of orthodoxy is at all tenable. But in any case it is this habit of blurring personality, or, as Mrs Besant would perhaps prefer to call it, individuality, which is

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significant. The theosophists do not seem to see as, for instance, Mr Edward Carpenter sees, that Nirvana, or the Beatific Vision, does not involve the extinction of individualities, but in some mysterious way involves their completion. The more any individual becomes one with another, the more does he come unto him- self; the more boldly and brilliantly does his own individuality emerge. Mr Carpenter somewhere or other records the belief of a lady of his acquaintance as to the final state of the blessed. She was of opinion that perfection would have been reached when we had all become " a happy mass." The lady in question was probably a theosophist.

Theosophists, like spiritualists, think far too much about the next world or the next stage. They are even more open to the charge of sky-piloting than the modern Christian, and, with the exception of Mr Herbert Burrows, I know of no theosophist who is doing much valuable constructive work in the world of affairs. Some years ago I brought some such charge against English theosophists in the Daily Chronicle, and received in answer more than one letter from people attached to the leadership of Mrs Katherine Tingley, who repudiates Mrs Besant and gives herself out as the true successor of Madame Blavatsky. The theosophic movement, which was established in the first place to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood, has broken up into many warring sections, the leaders not hesitating to call each other liars and even poisoners. I could write a most extraordinary history of the movement from this point of view, but it would hardly serve a useful pur-

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pose. All kinds of societies starting out with the most brotherly motives have split up into warring sections, and the keener their convictions the more numerous the splits. I do not therefore intend to enter into the controversy between the two main opposing theosophic sections,1 but would point out that, however valuable Mrs Tingley's various social schemes may be, Mrs Besant has not been a mere theoriser. It is not a question as to which of them is the true successor of Madame, for any criticism that I have brought against the one might equally have been brought against the other, and with even greater weight against Madame Blavatsky herself. In point of fact, it is a criticism, not so much of theosophists as of theosophy, which on the whole exercises a paralysing influence on action.

Mrs Besant, in her agnostic and pre-theosophic days, was a constructive Socialist and a vigorous social reformer. Her practical work has to all intents and purposes ceased. In a sense she admits this. She holds that an inch of theory is worth yards of practice ; that faith is more important than works. She does not agree with the slipshod saying :

" For warring creeds let angry bigots fight, He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."

She knows that according to a man's faith so are his works, and that, if only the faith is there, the works must follow as inevitably as a tree puts on its leaves. Why, then, has she suffered paralysis?

1 Since writing this, Mrs Besant's own section of theosophy has itself been violently subdivided by an unsavoury scandal which it would be out of place to discuss in these pages.

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The reason is two-fold. The theosophic faith is in- tellectual rather than spiritual, and is even intellectually wrong. It is the faith of the superior person and a religious factory for prigs. It tends too much to say, " Blessed are the trained investigators, for they shall see God." Theosophists pride themselves on their calmness, intellectuality, fairness, indifference, want of passion. Their ideal is the schoolmaster. Their Christs are the masters. Their God is the teacher. A letter lies before me from a disciple of theosophy in criticism of a certain lecture I had given on the subject, where I had complained of theosophic superiority, instancing a young theosophist who had told us he was on a Great Wheel, or in an Inner Circle, or on some vantage-ground or other, from which he was able to patronise his fellow-men. He saw no harm in music-halls or in public-houses, but he him- self had got beyond such vulgar amusements, and had learnt to call them common, though not unclean. The letter in question is a protest against my having chosen this particular young man as an example, for " it is hardly fair to criticise a whole body of people by the behaviour of some individuals in that body." The writer is intimate with theosophists both in Eng- land and in America, and was for two years a member of the largest lodge in America. From the social point of view there was, he says, no such superiority as I had suggested. But he fails altogether to notice that I had suggested no such thing. It was intel- lectual priggishness of which I had complained ; the all too conscious superiority of the young person on the higher plane, or of Mrs Besant, who has definitely

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repudiated democracy and holds that no person should be allowed a vote until they have passed a mental examination. The writer himself immediately proceeds unconsciously to prove my point. For he continues : " It is absurd to suppose that a person capable of appreciating Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or Shakespeare, or Wagner, or Watts the painter, does not feel himself on a decidedly higher plane than he who simply lives the life of an animal." Such people realise that they are on a plane that robs music-halls, soirees, and such-like of their attraction. Emerson said : " A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers in the almshouse of this world." The writer further holds that " there is a virtue in pride." He quotes the laws of the universe, gravitation, chemical affinity, etc., to illustrate the way theosophists are attracted towards superior persons with philosophic and scientific minds, for they have "at bottom little use for the vast mass that divide their worship between mammon, emotionalism, and conventionality. Jesus left His parents to associate with the priests of the Temple." The answer to this assertion is that He did not. His public life seems to have been one long attempt to escape from the priests and the superior person gener- ally. Now, this attitude of intellectual contempt and of discovering in intellectual analysis the roots of religion is in itself sufficient to explain the paralysis of theosophy in face of the enormous evils of the present day. The religious prig is complacent and lacks the fire and impetuosity of the Holy Spirit. Body, intellect, and spirit are the trinity of which

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man is composed, but the greatest of these is neither body nor mind, but spirit. Intellectual analysis is important as supplying data for the will and spirit of man to work upon, but it does not itself give the driving force. Beyond all this the theosophic analysis does not seem to be true. It results in the theory, or, to be more accurate, the dogma of reincarnation, and this dogma imposes a further paralysis upon the will. The theory that a person is in precisely the outward conditions for which his previous life on earth is responsible is not a theory which in the long run will make for righteousness. If a poor man is out of a job and starving, not because he is being unjustly treated but because he is being justly treated, con- templation of the fact will not stir you to indignation nor stir him to alter his conditions. It will lead to resignation rather than revolution. I know it is argued that the rich have no right to oppress him, and that it is an excellent exercise on behalf of your own soul to help him ; but, nevertheless, reincarnation has strained the spring of vigorous action and it will not work. Many are the protests of theosophists against this conclusion, but the fact remains that they are not revolutionists. Mrs Besant, so far as she is interested in the social question, is living in the after- math of her Socialist period. The other day she gave a most penetrating exposition of the evil social conditions of our people, but what was the remedy to be ? Democracy had hitherto failed because people will not trust each other. Until the people learnt to rely implicitly in Mr John Burns what chance of progress could there be ? Our only hope is that

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human nature can be so changed as to induce faith in leaders of the type of Mr Burns. Starving, ignorant men can riot and even make revolution, but only wisdom and love can build up a new civilisation that shall endure. Mrs Besant then dealt with the question of Socialism, and spoke of the interest of the great and misunderstood woman, H. P. Blavatsky, who approved of the attempts that were being made to change the misery of the East End. Not only words but deeds did she indulge in ; " for one day, after I had been telling her of some of the piteous sights that I was seeing day by day as a member of the London School Board, as it was then, for the East End of London, I had on the following morning a little characteristic note, in which she enclosed a couple of sovereigns, saying : ' You know I am only a pauper, but give these to the little children who asked you yesterday for a flower.' " Madame had once travelled steerage in order to buy tickets for poor travellers. This certainly shows goodness of heart, although the former instance might be expected from any kindly disposed Tory duchess, and neither of these instances evidence the slightest desire for, or knowledge of, social reconstruction. Mrs Besant quotes with approval H. P. B.'s answer to the question : Are you a Socialist ? " I believe in the Socialism that gives ; I do not believe in the Socialism that takes." Now, this from Mrs Annie Besant is the merest clap-trap, and proves conclusively how thoroughly theosophy can chloro- form the ablest mind.

In Europe theosophists may still have work to do. They may still fulfil a useful function in insisting on

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the importance of contemplation in a world of action and bustle which tends to forget it. But one cannot have it both ways. In emphasising contemplation they have depreciated action. In India, in so far as they en- courage reverence for the old religions and irreverence for Herbert Spencer, their work is even more admirable. One of the Church papers has attacked Mrs Besant for discouraging a young Hindoo from Christian baptism. The facts seem to be that Mrs Besant found that the young man was leaving his own religion without ever having adequately studied or appreciated it ; his soul had acquired a cheap veneer of European culture. He had been Spencerised. She suggested to him that a bad Hindoo does not make a particularly good Christian, and it might be better if he understood and learnt to reverence his own faith before he exchanged it so light-heartedly for another. Mrs Besant has earned the gratitude of all orthodox Christians for very sensible advice, and the consequent hostility of the religious newspapers.

But, for all this, the tendency of theosophy is too much towards a mushy cosmopolitanism and intel- lectual priggishness. It remains, to a great extent, the religion of the den and the drawing-room. Theo- sophists are sweet, tolerant, patient, and charitable, but they lack the adventurous spirit, and are not moved with indignation. They come to bring peace, not a sword, and their brand is, I fear, peace at any price. " The wrath to come " is to them an empty phrase. They lead the all too simple life. Their placid philo- sophy suggests a diet of vegetables. The lotus is their symbol. Should it not rather be the lettuce?

TOLSTOYAN THEORY AND DOUKHOBOR PRACTICE

Doukhobors, English and Russian — Tolstoy and the Church— John the Baptist — The four negative commandments — Tolstoy refuses to dance.

TOLSTOYAN THEORY AND DOUKHOBOR PRACTICE

ONE night, years ago, between the hours of ten and eleven, there arrived at our diminutive flat in Paddington a little band of men and women, who explained that they were Doukhobors and had altogether abandoned the belief in money. As the London hotel-keepers still clung to this belief, they expressed themselves as willing to stay with us for so long a time as we cared to have them. One of the party I had known some years before as a Methodist temperance reformer and a Socialist, and we had become friends; the rest were complete strangers. In return for our hospitality they offered to work for us in any way we liked, from mending electric wires and reading the meter, to moving our furniture and instructing us in the art of living. There was every prospect of their proving interesting, and they looked very tired, so we consented to their remaining. How we all managed to sleep in that three-roomed flat has always been to me a mystery only less baffling than the story told me that night and afterwards expanded by a friendly critic of Tolstoyan beliefs.

"5

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There is, or rather was until a few years ago, in one of the eastern counties, a little colony of people who, tired of civilisation, were longing to live the simple life. If they could but support themselves on the land they would be content. From the first their chance of success was endangered by certain " whole hoggers," who would for long periods withdraw from spade work and wander about preaching their gospel from town to town. These literalist interpreters of the Sermon on the Mount eventually insisted on introducing tramps into the colony. No one, whether worker or idler, who wished to join was to be turned away. This led to a dissension, and a young journalist who had saved a little money, wishing to give the extremists a chance, bought another piece of land and handed it over to them to work on strictly communistic principles. They soon got into trouble about their rates and taxes, and the local authorities seem to have been needlessly severe, taking even their implements of labour in payment of the debt. Tramps and ne'er-do-wells imposed on their good nature; and if these English Doukhobors are some- times criticised for "sponging" on other people, it must be remembered in their favour that they generally took of others' superfluity, while they themselves often gave all that they had. Few of their guests worked, and all had big appetites. On the principle that if any will not work, neither shall he eat, they were compelled at last to modify their communism, and eventually we find the workers pegging out their own plots and by dint of incessant labour just managing to keep the wolf from the door. At this point tramps

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who visited the colony were offered the unclaimed and waste land ; they might work it or leave it. I believe they invariably left it. Presently, however, the journalist returned, and finding his conditions not observed, demanded back his land. Judge of his amazement when he was told that there was not a single passage in the Gospels that could be cited in favour of legal matters, and therefore they had been obliged to destroy his title-deeds and had not the slightest intention to quit.

Meanwhile, things were going ill with the eastern colony. The moderates had abandoned it to an extremist remnant, who felt it their duty to live together in a big barn and to entertain tramps who gave them smallpox. The magistrates were disgusted, and any slight inclination to purchase the works of Count Tolstoy that may have existed among the local ratepayers now entirely died out.

Although the claim of these English people to the title Doukhobor cannot technically be maintained, for the Doukhobors are a Russian sect up till now ex- clusively recruited from the peasant class and dating back to the eighteenth century, yet they are curiously like them not only in creed but in physical appear- ance, and the vicissitudes of their little colonies seem to repeat on a small scale the first experiences of these Russian sectaries when they had come out of their Egypt into Canada, their land of promise. Moreover, the recent decision to drop the term Doukhobor in favour of the comprehensive if some- what cumbrous title, "Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood," suggests their willingness to

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include within their ranks all sympathisers with their opinions.

The original Doukhobors or " spirit-wrestlers " have passed through periods of suppression and toleration, have been cruelly scourged, have worked in chains in dark mines, have shown themselves capable of the heights of heroism and the depths of crime. Their normal life seems to have been neither so criminal as the Russian authorities would have us believe, nor so heroic as it is painted by Tolstoy, but was — according to Mr Aylmer Maud, who knows them as well as anybody in this country — that of worthy folk, who, although ignorant, suspicious, fanatical, and clannish, are "industrious, cleanly, temperate, hospitable, thrifty, honest, and careful of their children."

They form a living Church with a more or less flexible creed, rather than a body of men assenting to a set of unalterable doctrines. The fellowship creates the creed, not the creed the fellowship. More- over, persecution has led them to conceal their faith. Hence the difficulty of determining their beliefs. The fact of their illiteracy has saved them from bibliolatry, and they allow neither priest, bible, nor state to come between their souls and God. The inward voice in each is paramount — at least in theory. The material world is evil. Our pre-existent souls are fallen and are imprisoned in a world of sense. Our business is to destroy this sensuous universe and, remembering that all men belong to one family, to establish in its stead the Kingdom of God. In theory, again, this kingdom is to be a theocracy, but as in the case of the Dowieites, theocracy in practice

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has meant the rule of a despot, to whom are paid divine honours. The Doukhobors have always had these god-men, and it is to them even more than to the inward voice that appeal is actually made. Deprived of their leader, they are as sheep not having a shepherd ; their action becomes hesitating ; contra- dictory quarrels and schism are perpetual.

Their leader at the time I write, Peter Verigin, shows extraordinary power, not only in securing obedience when he ruled from a prison thousands of miles away, but by his statesmanlike solution of the deadlock between the settlers and the English Government, and by reconverting the Canadian Doukhobors from private property to communism.

For, curiously enough, just what had happened on a small scale in England had occurred among the Doukhobors in Canada. At first strictly communal, a large proportion of the groups had gradually abandoned this principle in favour of private holdings. Verigin, influenced by Tolstoy, reimposed commun- ism, and now the Canadian experiment might be described as a communistic autocracy.

Although the Doukhobors preceded Tolstoy by many hundreds of years, it is to the Russian prophet * that they owe much of their recent intellectual de- velopment. At this point, therefore, it will be interesting to turn to Tolstoyanism, with which they have so much in common and which claims millions of disciples throughout the world.

This more than prophet, who casts his word against

1 As in the case of Mrs Eddy, these paragraphs were written before the death of Count Tolstoy.

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the House of Romanoff, is no reed shaken by the wind, but an unyielding exponent of the cause of poverty. They imprison his disciples, but do not imprison him. It may be because they consider the doctrine of non- resistance harmless ; but, if so, why should they lay hands on his followers ? He is claimed as the great interpreter of Christ, but the distinctive notes in his gospel are by no means obviously Christian.

Back to Nature, Back to the Land, Back to the Gospels, so run the popular watchwords ; but are they not mutually contradictory ? For it is by no means evident that a return to nature involves a return to Gospels written with the express purpose of supple- menting nature by grace ; and the land-backers should ponder the fact that the Gospel did not com- mend itself to the simple-lifers of the country-side but spread like wild-fire among the complex-lifers of the Greek cities. Possibly they were tired of com- plexities ; but, on the other hand, they were proud of their "life" as citizens and heartily despised the " mere existence " of the villager, and with all this took to the Christian religion as a duck takes to the water. In any case, I think we may safely say that the statement about God making the country and man the town would have puzzled the " citizen of no mean city " exceedingly.

Among the many thousands who are playing with the notions first enunciated by Lot's wife, and used as an effective title at a later date by Mr Edward Bellamy, one meets a few who are not only looking but walking backwards ; they get terribly bruised in the process, banging into civil institutions and bash-

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ing the back of their heads against sharp edges of the Catholic Church, but they continue their progression by retrogression undismayed, amid the plaudits of the mob who are looking neither backward nor forward, but only looking on and shouting hoarsely : " At any rate, you are sincere ! "

But no one asks : " Why go back ? " Everyone assumes that Tolstoy is the really consistent Christian, although we can't all of us live so rigidly. But why not ? One hardly ever sees his ideas seriously chal- lenged. He has backed out of civilisation — such civi- lisation as exists in Russia — and everybody applauds. He mistakes the anarchy known in Russia as admini- stration for the real thing, and anathematises all government ; and everybody says, " How practical and saintly and Christian ! " He dismisses liturgies and ceremonies as " bosh," and everybody says, " How primitive ! " The Church registers his opposition to her principles and traditions by a sentence of excom- munication, and everybody says, " How intolerant ! "

It is not easy to understand why Tolstoy should wish to belong to a Church whose history he holds to be an unrelieved record of crime and apostasy. In his Overthrow of Hell it is the Devil who arranges the miracles, suggests the Sacrament, and invents the Church. In the Appeal to the Clergy he denounces almost every doctrine the Church holds sacred, and, in a recent letter to Sabatier, deliberately rejects it as wholly evil. It is not only corrupt now ; it was never anything else. Yet we are asked to believe that his denunciations of the communion to which he belongs, and which he has consistently fought and hated, show

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breadth of outlook, while its retaliation by his expul- sion shows bigotry and persecution.

If the Visible Society was from the first so wholly abominable, we fail to understand why Leo Tolstoy should accept the Gospels it gives him and reject those which it has rejected. He would find in the Apocryphal Gospel rejected of the Church much to please him. In fact, the Apocryphal Christ agrees more closely with the Tolstoyan Christ than does the Messiah of the Synoptics. I would advise Count Tolstoy to throw over our Gospels as tainted with the authorship and approval of the Church, and to base his new religion upon the rejected Christian writings. The censor's blacking-brush would not then be so necessary.

Tolstoy knows little or nothing of modern criticism, and despises both ancient and modern commentaries. He has altogether failed to understand that the Gospels are themselves but human commentaries on the life of Jesus — compilations made from the notes not of the reporters of Christ, but of the reporters of His reporters.

For at least two hundred years the Christian Church had no Christian Bible, but its own members during that period were making one. The sacred writings now known as the canon of Holy Scripture are an afterthought of the Christian Church. They are commentaries by Churchmen on the life of Jesus. It is therefore to Church tradition that we should turn when in doubt about the interpretation of individual passages. Such a course destroys the Tolstoyan position. Tolstoy has yet to explain on what grounds

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he rejects the Church and bases his whole teaching on the Church's official literature.

It is puzzling to find a man of Tolstoy's intellectual grasp seemingly unaware of the theory of religious evolution. This could hardly have been possible in any country but Russia, where intellectual activity apparently works so wholly outside the pale of the Church. Count Tolstoy notices that civilisation is different from savagery, the mass from the meal in the upper chamber, the Catholic religion from the Gospel, and in that they are different the latter phases are self- condemned. It may be so, but why assume it ? Is the oak self-condemned because it differs from the acorn ?

Leo Tolstoy is a convert, a leader of great force and integrity, a realist within certain narrow limits, but he is neither a Christian apostle nor a Chris- tian philosopher. A man who has never faced the theory of Catholic development, the most suggestive hypothesis of modern theology, can hardly be taken seriously as theologian or philosopher. Tolstoy is a parochial casuist.

People used sneeringly to say he does not practise what he preaches. They can hardly say that now. Tolstoy owes his enormous power — a power that reaches to the ends of the earth — to intense earnest- ness and fulgent convictions. He reminds one of Ibsen's "Brand." It is "all or nothing" with him. Opposition on the score of insincerity is dumb before such writings as his. It is only the very stupid- minded or evil-hearted who will deride his attempts to lead the life of a peasant in the luxurious house he has made over to his wife.

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Men can never get right with God until they get right with one another. The shirkers feast while the workers starve. Some men are overworked and underfed to produce food and house and raiment for idlers and gluttons. Justice is the basis of the Christian religion. Set your foundations in order. So far Leo Tolstoy's creed has at least the implicit support of the Gospels. People should learn to get their own living, and cease picking the pockets of the poor. Many physical diseases and mental maladies come upon a society which has forsaken justice. Games and gymnastics are no true substitute for manual labour.

But up to this point he has no quarrel with Catholic tradition as expressed in patristic authorities or the work of the earlier schoolmen, or even in so modern and local a form as our English Church Catechism. He does not seem to realise this, for he has no know- ledge of the living traditions of the Christian faith. He now proceeds to spoil his faith by battling, not against class luxuries wrung from hungry workers, but against luxury itself. He denounces the " Life of the Senses." He confuses sensuousness with sensuality. The virtue of magnificence is for him a vice. Marriage is the fallen life. Procreation of children is disgusting. Patriotism is crime. He wars not against the sinful lusts of the flesh, but is intolerant of all bodily desires. The censorial brush is used freely. Cana of Galilee must go, not in obedience to any law of textual criticism, but because miracles are silly, alcohol poisonous, and marriage filthy. On the same principle, he should have

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substituted the word "spirit" for "flesh" in the sentence "they twain shall be one flesh." He is sorely puzzled by Christ's use of wine in the Blessed Sacrament, for he hates the Sacrament and fermented liquor. So down sweeps the censorial brush again. The Devil invented the Sacrament and slipped it cunningly into the sacred text.

To a great extent Tolstoy's gospel is based on a four-fold commandment. His constant reiteration of love as fulfiller of law is weakened and vitiated by these " thou-shalt-nots " : (i) Thou shalt not drink fermented liquor. (2) Thou shalt not love thy country above others. (3) Thou shalt not harbour bodily desires. (4) Thou shalt not physically resist thy neighbour. Let us examine these negative rules in some detail.

(i) Thou shalt not drink lermented liquor. Were one disposed to doubt the possibility of turning water into wine at the marriage feast, it is obviously not the exaggeration of something done by an anti- marriage, anti-feasting, anti-alcoholic Teacher. The action is recorded as illustrative of a joyous Son of Man. The disciples of the austere John become disciples of the gracious Jesus, who immediately takes them (possibly on the Sabbath Day) to a wedding carouse, with its feasting and dancing and fun, and when the guests were merry with wine (the Greek is unmistakable), He supplies them, not with aerated water, but with better wine. Both St Matthew and St Luke paint the same kind of picture, insisting on Christ's own contrast between Himself and John. The Son of Man piped and they would not dance,

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the Baptist wailed and they would not weep. Has Leo Tolstoy piped or wailed to his generation? Does he complain, like John, because they refuse to weep, or like Jesus because they refuse to dance? Does he come eating meat and drinking wine, or, like John, neither eating nor drinking? Christ's anti- asceticism is indisputable, if asceticism be taken in the popular, Manichaean sense, and not in the Pauline sense of athletic training and fitness. Could the particular accusation of gluttony and drunkenness be brought against an ascetic who took no pleasure in food and had never tasted wine ? Note the emphasis laid by the Evangelist upon Christ's social meals with disreputables, His choice of wine for the Sacrament, and His expectation of a happy state of society in which one would drink wine with one's friends.

(2) Thou shalt not love thy country above all others. Tolstoy in his protest against jingoism falls into an exaggerated cosmopolitanism, denying the value of particular friendships, of national ties, of family bonds. He tries to arrive at universal love by ignoring particular affections. Love for all men and the inter- communion of nations is undoubtedly an essential of the Gospel of Christ; exclusive love of one's own people, involving contempt and ostracism of others, is undoubtedly condemned. But a careful study of the Gospels and of Christian tradition will suggest that our religion is not so much cosmopolitan as inter- national. Now internationalism implies there being particular nations to internationalise, and must there- fore be contrasted with the narrow and jealous local pride of the jingo, as also with the vague and hazy

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affection for abstract humanity, which is the mark of a cosmopolitan. Whoso loves not Russia whom he hath seen, how shall he love the universe whom he hath not seen ? Leo Tolstoy interprets Christ's anti- jingo utterances as anti-nationalist, but Our Lord's very vehemence against exclusiveness seems to be rooted in a passionate love of His own people, and in intense shame that their patriotism should be degraded into a bastard patriotism, which confines neighbourliness to people of the same blood and indulges itself in every kind of petty and ungenerous refusal. His burning love for mankind was not in- consistent with an intimate personal friendship, a preference for the family at Bethany, peculiar inti- macies with certain followers, and instinctive turning to his own countrymen. One comes no nearer to universal love by starving more local affections. The Sacramental teaching of the Church develops this Gospel seed of truth. For instance, the Real Presence of God focused in the Bread and Wine of the Mass, bears witness to His universal presence in men and things, and reveals the sacred mystery of the common meal. Through the particular to the universal would seem the more excellent way, nor will the particular affections ever be vaguely merged in a larger love ; for as we lose ourselves in that colossal love, we find both ourselves and our friends, and the more local and particular affections, are given greater vitality. Peculiar devotion to nation or individual would seem to be a permanent facet of a brilliant and complex life.

(3) Thou shalt not harbour physical desire.

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Tolstoy asserts boldly that the procreation of children is evil and that guilt attaches to the institution of marriage. He alleges that Jesus taught the vileness of physical feeling and of its gratification. This allegation is based on one or two isolated passages of Scripture which have given rise to a vast amount of controversy.

Everyone who looketh on a woman for lust, etc. (Matt. v. 28). But here the saying is contrasted with the old command about adultery. What, then, in- fringed the ancient law ? One thing only, i.e. living with another man's wife without his consent, for she was his property along with his oxen and slaves. Any number of concubines was allowed. Tiring of your wife, and lusting after other women, you might procure a divorce on any pretext. The explicit pronounce- ment of Christ on this point is that such a law is abominable. The looking at another woman for lust is disloyalty to the wife. Woman is not any longer to be a mere chattel. She has her rights and her dignity. The original form of this saying may be as recorded in St Mark. The pronouncement accord- ing to this account was made in Judaea in answer to the Pharisees, probably on the very spot where John the Baptist's career had come to an end through his de- nunciation of the illicit union of Herod and Herodias.1

How Tolstoy produces from this incident and the Sermon on the Mount a condemnation of all physical desire passes comprehension. St Luke adds that the disciples felt that if marriage was to be strictly observed, it might be wiser not to marry; and

1 Burkitt, Transmission of the Gospels.

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Christ replies that His teaching on marriage is only for those who are able to bear it, and there are some who have remained celibate for the Kingdom's sake. He may mean either that celibacy or the bonds of strict matrimony are for those who are able to bear it; but it is quite clear that He was not exalting celibacy above matrimony in a normal and settled state of society. We must remember that they were expecting the imminent and turbulent ending of an epoch, and the ushering in of the Kingdom within the lifetime of some of themselves. A counsel of celibacy in time of stress and persecution is easily understood, for in face of terrible risks it may be wiser for the soldier to remain unencumbered by family ties, nor has he any right to drag others into danger. But it must be remembered that the Gospels are very carefully selected and concentrated accounts of Christ's teaching, and it is therefore all the more significant that their writers hasten to record an incident which proves that He is not condemning marriage nor procreation, for we are told that some of His followers, who may have misinterpreted Him in just this Tolstoyan sense, were preventing little children from being brought to Him by their mothers for blessing. If marriage was an iniquity the off- spring of marriage should surely not be blessed. " When Jesus saw it He was much displeased, and said ' Suffer the little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.' "

There is, so far as I know, only one other passage which would bear upon this subject. The Sadducees who denied the Resurrection found themselves in

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opposition to a newer school of thought led by the Pharisees. Neither of these schools believed in the modern Christian's somewhat hazy heaven, nor is there anything in Christ's immediate teaching to suggest modern conceptions of the life beyond the grave. I do not contend that He denied that life. The Church's ideas about future existence are implicit in the Gospels ; but He seemed with the Pharisees to point men more immediately to this earth as the arena of the life that now is and the life that is to come, and by the life of the world to come to be more immediately referring to the new epoch that was to be ushered in upon this earth. The current belief was that the drowsing dead would, in the coming of the new epoch, be raised in their bodies to share in the new life of the Golden Age. The Sadducees, who considered such teaching an unnecessary innovation, brought the following objection from the Mosaic Law. According to Moses, a man was compelled to marry his deceased brother's wife if there had been no children. But supposing seven brothers had married her in succession, whose wife would she be in the Golden Age when they were all raised to life again? This was a very common controversy of the schools, and the Pharisee generally answered by assigning the woman to the first of the husbands. Jesus rebukes the questioners, for they neither understood the spirit of the old writings, nor God's power; for in the Golden Age there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. The latter part of the sentence refers, of course, to the habit of the parent or other guardian determining whom the child should marry without

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any choice on her own part. They would be as the angels. The scribes or the Pharisees, according to St Luke's account, approved this answer. The passage is very obscure, and can neither be used in a pro- ascetic or pro-sensuous direction, for the meaning of " as the angels " is lost. It must be remembered that Christ's contemporaries did not consider the angels as sexless, and the Old Testament contains a story of the union of angels and women. There seems to be a peculiar irony in the fact that the Church which Tolstoy rejects has, in the main and up to the present, rejected the sensuous interpretation put upon this passage by the very communities most in agreement with Tolstoy ; for many communistic bodies have practised free-love in supposed obedience to the dictates of this very passage.1

(4) Thou shalt not physically resist thy neighbour. Jesus found a world of individuals quick to resent personal affronts and the nations, at each other's throats. He revealed to men the inner constitution of the world, namely, that they were all one family with one Father in Heaven. He does not counsel no resistance of personal and national injuries by violence, but no resistance of that kind of injury at all, either by sword or tongue or pen. The passage has no reference to resistance in general nor to the methods of resistance. If He forbade all resistance of any evil, then Tolstoy's writings are as much out of Court as the bullet, the ballot-box, and the bayonet. That he is not referring here to anything but national squabbles

1 Or, it may mean that in the Golden Age woman would have her freedom to choose,

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and petty personalities is clear from innumerable traditional interpretations. The violent scourging mentioned in the Fourth Gospel probably included brokers and drovers as well as cattle ; but, in any case, all four Gospels record His physical violence on this occasion. To knock the beer-jug out of a drunkard's hands is to physically resist him. To overturn the tables of the money-changers and drive them out of the Temple is physically to resist them. Renan suggests that Jesus was harassed and lost His temper — a suggestion worthy of the charming author of the French romance.

In point of fact, the placid Buddha Christ is a fig- ment of the Tolstoyan imagination. Passionately in sympathy with the poor, patient in face of personal affront, this Comrade of mankind and gentle Playmate of children, who urges a generosity which will forget and forgive, thunders against the enemies of His Kingdom, prophesies its advent which will scatter men as dust, threatens the weeping and gnashing of teeth, curses hypocrites, approves the violent storming of the portals of heaven. The Tolstoyan Christ would not have pronounced woe to Capernaum, would not have cursed the fig-tree, would not have ostracised the enemies of His Church, would not have denounced His contemporaries as serpents, whited sepulchres, worse than harlots. The Tolstoyan Christ would not have called His king "that fox," would not have called a stupid disciple Satan, would not have said that it would be more tolerable for Sodom in the Day of Judgment than for those cities which refused to harbour His followers. The Tolstoyan

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Christ is mild, the Gospel Christ is angry. His denunciations are so fierce that His friends come to think Him a bigoted extremist and His foes are goaded to madness. If text is to be hurled against text : " He that has no sword, let him sell his gar- ment and buy one," must be paralleled with " Resist not evil." But, of course, the isolated text tells us nothing. Whatever be the true interpretation of " Those who take the sword shall perish by the sword," the Gospel picture is most certainly not the modern portrait of the well-behaved stained-glass saint of Count Tolstoy's imagination.

Here in the Gospels is One who, in His own person, reconciles fury and love. He is no peace at any price Buddha, but One who shakes empires, removes mountains, scatters the proud, fills the hungry, and sends the rich empty away. He comes to cast fire upon the earth, and longs to see it blazing. He is come not to send peace but a sword, yet warns men that those who have no ideal beyond the sword shall perish with the sword. He comes to break up family life with His keen-edged and terrible Gospel, so that the father will be set against the son and the daughter against her mother. His kingdom is not of this world, with its mean ideals and money-grubbing standards. The revolution had first to work in men's hearts and men's minds before it could find use for swords. But it is only those who know something of the peace and fellowship of the happy warrior who can understand the fierce fury of the Prince of Peace.

One feels that Tolstoy has sometimes substituted for the positive command, "Love one another," the

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negative command, " Do not knock one another about" The doctrine of love will drive you in nine cases out of ten to the outward course of not resisting your neighbour. In the tenth it will drive you with equal force to the outward course of knocking him down. Must one obey the letter of the law? If so, by what right do Tolstoyans oppose their neighbours by argument or resist them by threatening moral con- sequences for their wrong-doings? Once I asked a meeting of Tolstoyans to picture to themselves some evil man, blind and deaf, rushing headlong to a precipice. Would you fling yourself in his way and hurl him back ? For resistance here is equivalent to saving your enemy, and murder would be the uglier name for non-resistance. " Leave him alone ! " shouted the logical Tolstoyan, but the others, thank heaven, were as illogical as the Count himself, who does not carry his literalism to such lengths. Yet sometimes he writes as though one must not physically prevent the torture of children or animals. He argues his theory with the terrifying logic of the insane. In the interests of universal abstract humanity many people have been driven to cruelty and crime.

A comparison between Count Tolstoy and St Francis would be illuminating. The Count conceives holy poverty to be his duty ; St Francis found it his delight The Italian is pleased to be unencumbered by possessions and to live in the sun. He caught the sunny spirit of Galilee. Tolstoy is dark and dutiful. It would be the Italian and not the Russian who would know the meaning of Whitman's saying : " I give nothing as duties. What others give as duties

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I give as living impulses. Shall I give the heart's action as a duty ? "

We are driven to the conclusion that Count Leo Tolstoy is one of John's disciples. Right loyally has he followed the Baptist. When John has mourned, Tolstoy has wept When Christ has piped to him he has not danced. Dancing is a vice of which he dis- approves. Somewhere he says of dancing — it is a " silly wriggling and twisting of the limbs."

And yet modern Europe is dark enough, and modern Russia its darkest spot ; and if Tolstoy has lost the road, few if any of us have found it, and none of us can afford to despise the courage and sincerity of the old leader who has written : " My heart is breaking with despair because we have all lost the road ; and while I struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, instead of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ' See ! He is in the swamp with us ! '"

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS

An encounter — A poor type of religion — The secondary importance of phenomena — Unorthodox orthodoxy — Spiritism a protest — Incep- tion and growth of the movement — The value of Sir Oliver Lodge and of Mr Davey — Spiritism and fraud — Its relation to Broad Churchism — Commonplace and unconvincing morality — The virtues of spiritism.

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS

" I AM astonished to find myself shaking hands with you ! " The speaker was a short man with a strong face and particularly piercing eyes. He had been introduced to me in a North Lancashire tavern after considerable persuasion. Some years ago he had read an article of mine on spiritualism which had appeared in some London paper, and had been enraged by what he considered the unfairness of its criticism. The article in question, so far as I can remember it, contained a plea for " not proven " as regards spiritist phenomena. This annoyed my friend, but would hardly account for his extraordinary resentment. I had suggested that the phenomena of spiritualism were, after all, of comparative unimportance ; that it was the religion sought to be established by means of the phenomena which was worthy of serious attention; that this religion claimed to be such a revelation of goodness and of wisdom, made from the spirit world, as could not be arrived at upon this earth without trans- mediumship and spirit communication. I had further, so far as I remember, quoted from addresses alleged to have been given under spirit control, addresses

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which were regarded by spiritualists as containing a gospel far beyond anything this earth could pro- duce, and had come to the conclusion that the religious information they contained, although far above the gospel of popular Calvinism, was far below the gospel of such men as Maurice or Tyrell or Stuart Headlam. The spiritist claim, therefore, to a special revelation was not more proven than their supernormal phenomena. This was the con- tention that had stirred my now friendly critic to angry contempt.

And although I shall have something to say about spiritist phenomena, it is with the religion of spirit- ualists that this chapter will chiefly deal, for it is the ultimate beliefs of people, rather than the method by which they have come to them, that chiefly concern us in a work on " Byways of Belief." For what, after all, had happened to my North Lancashire critic ? Whether one believed or disbelieved the alleged evidences of spiritualism, did not so much concern him. I had challenged his faith, but his faith had challenged his former life and had brought him out of darkness into light That is how he put it He had been leading a life sometimes positively evil and always meagre and purposeless. He had been brought up in what his father and mother were pleased to call Christian orthodoxy ; had been educated to believe in a wrathful, mutable, vindictive God ; in the never-ending tortures of hell to be applied to those who could not or would not believe; in the resurrection of the carcass ; that man immediately after death is either a perfect saint, fit for the companionship of God

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and His angels, or a perfect devil, fit for everlasting companionship with the Devil and his demons ; that saints and sinners are to be equally rewarded or punished, regardless of good deeds springing from a kindly heart or the magnitude and number of their crimes ; that every word of the Bible is infallible, and that to perceive its numerous contradictions is to be damned ; that a man must blindly accept and must stifle the dictates of his reason ; that bodily death was introduced in consequence of a man having eaten an apple in disobedience to a command ; that a man can avoid the just punishment of his sins simply by believing that his sins were imputed to Christ, and that Christ's goodness is imputed to him by the Juggler of the Heavens. He had escaped from all these things, and from the lethargy which had fol- lowed upon his revolt against such a religion and his inability to build a belief for himself, and the deliverance had come through the teachings of the spiritualists and certain personal experiences, which he is convinced were messages from the spirit world. What wonder that he was furious with me !

The cult,generally called spiritualism in this country is called spiritism on the Continent ; for it is argued that the phrase spiritualism is opposed to materialism, and that, although spiritists are spiritualists in that they accept a spiritualist as against a materialist philosophy of life, they are only a small section of those to whom the larger term should apply. In all ages men have believed in the return of the dead and in the possibility of all kinds of spirit phenomena,

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but modern spiritism comes as a protest against that dead ness of materialism into which so large a portion of the Protestant peoples of England and America had sunk in the last century. Calvinism in its varied forms had driven them in protest to a materialism which contained within itself no promise of life and little energy. Modern spiritism now appears upon the scene. It is the religion of people who believe them- selves to be in communion with the dead through spirit-rappings, trance speeches, and various material- isations. It dates from the year 1848, when Mr and Mrs Fox, and their two daughters, believed themselves to be in communication with a murdered pedlar in Hydeville, New York. The Foxes are subsequently found at Rochester, and are controlled by various spirits. In 1855 the first professional medium visits England, and Keighley in Yorkshire becomes an active centre of spiritist propaganda. Now there are probably considerably over a hundred spiritualist meetings on Sunday in England alone, there are spiritualist halls in more than sixty English towns, and the spiritist movement throughout the world is publishing at least a hundred newspapers.

Now, as to the phenomena of spiritism, it is difficult to understand why so many churchgoers should be contemptuous of stories involving the return of the dead, for their Churchmanship, as described by themselves, consists chiefly in training for the skies and in belief in the continuity of life beyond the grave. Of course, they place their future world a long way off. The popular Christian concep- tion of heaven seems to be that it is beyond the

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farthest star, but still one does not understand why they should harbour such an a priori objection against the possibility of spirit communication. One sometimes wonders what one's fellow-Christians mean when they monotone their belief in the communion of saints.

But, for all this, after long experience of spiritualist phenomena, I must confess that it has left me un- convinced. We are told by spiritualists of this or that great scientist who has been converted at stances, but one must protest against the growing habit of flinging about big names as arguments. It is thought that because a man is a trained specialist upon a certain subject that his evidence is of altogether extraordinary value on every subject under the sun. Because Sir Oliver Lodge is an authority on radium, the newspaper-reading public eagerly seek after him as a final authority on anything from religion to radishes. The scientific specialist, who fully appre- ciates the complexity of his own subject, will gaily give his opinions without a doubt as to his capacity in other fields of investigation. And yet, why should it be supposed that Sir William Crookes' belief in spiritualist phenomena is of any great moment when a brilliant conjurer will tell you that, if he attends the performance of a fellow-conjurer, he is often quite unable to detect the methods by which his confrere arrives at his result, and would put them down to magic or spiritualism but that he remembers how easily his own results may so be tabulated ?

Some years ago a Mr Davey held a series of experiments in order to gauge the worth of human

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testimony to the miraculous. He gave himself out as a medium, and a great number of people attended his stances. He asked each sitter to write down as accurately as possible, and as soon as possible, his or her impressions of what had occurred. Mr Davey was a clever conjurer. The impressions were after- wards collected and published in the quarterly journal of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. They go far to show the worthlessness of a consider- able percentage of evidence to spiritualist occurrences. Mr Frank Podmore has dealt with the phenomena occurring under the mediumship of Mr Morse. Now, Mr Morse was highly respected in spiritualist circles, and his mediumship has often proved very remarkable. He is supposed to be particularly successful in spirit- rappings, by this method acquainting his sitters with the obituaries of the supposed dead. For instance, on 28th February 1874, a spirit rapped out the name Rosamira, who said she had died in Torquay on loth January 1874, that she had lived at Kilburn, and that her husband's name was Lancaster, his Christian name being Ben. Now, if you consult the obituary notices of I5th January of the same year in the Daily Telegraph, you will find that the rappings have registered accurate information. Thirty-eight of Mr Morse's spirit-rappings show a like accuracy, but the thirty-ninth case is the spirit of a cabdriver who had committed suicide in Marylebone on 2 ist February 1874. The significant feature of this rapping is that the cabman refused to give his name. Now, in the Pall Mall Gazette of the same date, we read that a cabdriver out of employment this morning

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threw himself under a steam-roller in Marylebone and was immediately killed. The name is not given, probably because the man was so crushed as to be unrecognisable. In thirty-eight cases, where the name is discoverable from the newspapers, Mr Morse gives it. In the thirty-ninth, where the name is undiscover- able from the newspapers, Mr Morse fails to give it. Hundreds of such cases could be quoted. The spiritualist newspapers are themselves full of warnings against fraudulent mediums, and admit frankly the vast amount of humbug which is being practised. They are perfectly honest and candid about the matter, and are at least anxious to exclude from their pages any but weighty and sufficient evidence. It does not, however, seem to me that they appreciate the value of evidence or possess any adequate criterion of what is or what is not evidential. Not so long ago there was a certain medium named Eldred, in whom the spiritualist papers put their trust. They believed his stances to be beyond suspicion, but his reputation suddenly collapsed, as he was badly discovered in an act of trickery. He had used a chair with a false bottom, under which were hidden his conjuring paraphernalia. A spiritualist paper actually enters a defence. Mr Eldred had satisfactorily explained the occurrence.1 He had been in a hypnotic state "in which he seemed to have lost his own personality, and while in that state he had done many things which he himself could not explain. . . . He does not know whether the influences from which he appeared to suffer were earthly or extra-terrestrial, but he

1 Annals of Psychical Research, No. 6, 1906.

IO

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thinks they were both — he has only very confused recollections of this period. Thus, he remembers very vaguely having bought or ordered the chair, but he does not remember either where or when, nor whether he was alone at the time of doing so. As for the objects found in it, he says he knows nothing about them ; it was not he who bought them, or who put them into the chair, he thinks." The same writer quotes some authority as saying that the frauds of mediums arise from an irresistible need to produce a certain state of things, to realise a desire of the soul, and gives the instance of the medium Karin, who, in a stance in which the expected blows were not heard, rose, unable to keep still, and before the eyes of all present struck the floor herself.

This is certainly significant, but can hardly be con- strued as accounting for the deliberate acts extending over some time, buying of trick apparatus, false beards and conjurers' chairs.

I can well imagine my North Lancashire critic replying to all this that he is sorry for me if evidence which he considers incontestable should have failed to convince, but that, after all, spiritualists are in possession of evidence of a far more valuable character than can be found in alleged materialisations or spirit- rappings. The beating of tambourines, the silly messages often given, may be equivalent to the stuttering attempts of a profoundly clever man to speak a foreign language. The argument of the anti- spiritists that, if ghosts can communicate with us, they would have something better to do than to play musical boxes, something better to say than the

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idiotic things rapped out, may not in reality amount to much for the reason just given. But the profound and final evidence brought forward by spiritualists, and regarded by them as all-important, lies in the nature of the gospel vouchsafed to men by the spirits of the departed through trance mediumship or auto- matic writing. It is with this contention that spiritualism as a religious force must stand or fall. It is alleged that men, under control of certain spirit guides, utter truths which are so far beyond anything that we human beings have as yet conceived, that they amount to a veritable revelation of stupendous importance.

For instance, it has been contended by spiritualists that the spirit teachings of the late Stainton Moses constitute such a revelation. A well-known spiritual- ist writes in introduction of these teachings : " Nor will I waste time and arguments in demonstrating the absolute and incontestable genuineness of spirit teachings: it is evident to all who read — even cursorily — the book itself. I will say more : I advise anyone who, after having read and duly pondered the volume of spirit teaching, does not come to see that this is a work of sublime genuineness, to re- nounce for ever the study of historical and literary criticism and exegesis, inasmuch as his profound in- aptitude for these studies would then need no further proof." These teachings, published by the London Spiritual Alliance, consist of a long series of messages purposing to express the thoughts of some discarnate spirits on a large variety of intensely interesting and important topics. They are chiefly, according to

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Moses himself, the outcome of the influence on him of " one commanding intelligence and of an action on my mind which eventuated in a development of thought amounting to nothing short of spiritual regeneration."

I have examined with minutest care this alleged revelation, and find in the claims put forward for it something that seemed to me infinitely comic, until I began to realise that it was tragedy and not comedy which was involved. For the teachings given are the mere commonplaces of the Broad Church school, the sometimes helpful, but generally crude and shallow, conclusions of a mind but lately liberated from the dungeons of popular Protestantism. For instance, religion, we are told by this commanding intelligence, reveals a loving Father in place of an angry tyrant, does not recognise any need of propitiation, knows nothing of election of a favoured few. " We leave to foolish men groping blindly in the dark their curious quibbles about theological figments." Then follows our duty to God and our duty to our neighbour and to ourselves. The revelation of God is progressive. Yield no obedience to any sectarian dogmas, and so on, and so on. If the commonplaces of modern theo- logy strike upon men's minds as a revelation so transcendent that only spirits could have vouchsafed it, how great is the darkness from which these people must have escaped. The spirits would seem to reflect much of the idle talk of to-day, for Dr Wallace, under spirit control, urges that Christianity should be creed- less and swiftly proceeds to expound its "main doctrines." In Light, 1892, p. 80, we have an example

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of one of the revelations vouchsafed to Mr Moses. On 23rd August 1872, Mr Moses went into his room and found a crown composed on his bed. Recently he had discovered a cross in the same place. " He called us to see it. Dr Steer put paper and pencil by it and locked the door, taking the key. On returning some time afterwards, we found written on the paper that had been left : ' Cross and crown. We are happy,' signed by the same spirits that had written before. That same evening we held a stance, and the medium was controlled to write the following message : ' We made the cross, and we made the crown. We wish to show you that the cross shall precede the crown, and that, in your case, the cross that has been shall be succeeded by the crown that is to be. We are watching and guarding you.' "

This is a fair example of the stupendous gospel of which we should have known nothing had it not been for spirits who have progressed far beyond the scope of our earthly knowledge, and have in these last days vouchsafed the revelation to the sons of men through Mr Moses and Dr Wallace !

And yet, have I not somewhere seen on some religious picture-postcard, or on the walls of Little Bethel, the words " No cross, no crown " ?

The upshot of the whole matter is this — that the people who have been attracted to spiritualism, and who have found in its teachings a hope and a refuge, do not include men and women who have been taught a rational Catholic faith. Calvinists and Papists, and a few of the narrower Anglicans, may find in it a revela- tion ; in so far as they do so, we cannot doubt that it

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contains a considerable element which is of God. But no one who had been properly grounded in a reasonable theology, with its paramount insistence on constructing a Kingdom of God here on earth, with its proportioned teaching about the next world, its doctrine of the saints and of angels and communion with the dead, its worship of an ever-present though transcendent God, could be in any way struck or impressed by the philosophy of spiritualism, its dreary errors, or its tiring truisms. But for all this, on the side of phenomena, no unbiased critic would think of accounting for it merely by a theory of conscious fraud. Unconscious and semi-conscious fraud plays a much more important part in these experiments. The " sensitive " is usually of the most uncritical type, and mediumship tends to destroy the critical faculty. But fraud, whether conscious or unconscious, does not account for the whole of the evidence. The Psychical Research Society has not proved the existence of spirits, but, if there is any value in scientific evidence, the Society has proved beyond all shadow of doubt the appearances of persons at the moment of their death. These may be spirits, they may be a kind of projected photograph of the dying person, but that they occur in good numbers is now no longer disput- able. Spiritualists have done considerable work in building up the evidence, and although the spirit hypothesis does not as yet convince me, I should be far from denying the possibility of its truth or label- ling as credulous others who differ from me in the matter. It is easier and much more excusable to denounce as credulity the conclusions of those who

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suppose that the spirit communications I have quoted amount in ethical uniqueness to a superhuman re- velation. But here, again, one must remember that revelation itself is a comparative matter, and must be glad to recognise that spiritualism has opened a door to many minds, giving them breadth for narrowness, hope in place of despair, and restoring to them their Heavenly Father, who comes to meet them even while they are a long way off.

There is a danger in spiritualism, as in theosophy, that the mind may be turned away from the things of this earth, so that the contemplation of another world or another stage of existence may paralyse action in this world. But it is not always so ; for one finds, for instance, in the ranks of the socialists some who are ardent spiritualists, and who translate what they believe is vouchsafed to them from the other world into channels of healthy reconstruction in this.

Although, therefore, spiritualism by no means reaches the high-water mark of current religious achievements, nor the profounder teachings of the mystics and religious heroes and heroines of past ages, nor helps us to a solution of the mysteries of life, it has for many proved a generous and liberating Gospel. To quote Mr Podmore,a none too sympathetic critic: "It has for two generations satisfied the intel- lectual needs and emotional cravings of hundreds of thousands of votaries. And its followers can at least boast that throughout that period they have shown a sympathy for opinion differing from their own, and a tolerance towards their opponents almost unique in the history of religious sects."

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER

Sources of information — An impressionist sketch — Wales ancient and modern — The Black Country — The religious background — The Church in Wales — Former revivals — Evan Roberts and his critics — The nature and spread of the revival — Its "vulgarity" — Immediate results — In defence of enthusiasm — Exciting the invalid — Lunacy — Causes of failure — Would institutionalism be wise? — Feminine not feminist — No constructive virility — Employers, tradesmen, and the movement — Its effect on politics — Wanted, another kind of revival.

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER

DURING the 1904-5 revival in Wales I was asked by an English newspaper to attend the meetings and give some account of them, but it seemed to me more interesting to wait a year or so and then visit Wales with the object of studying results. My first visit was therefore in 1908, and again in 1909 I spent a month or