Painted Windows Part 2

Of Bergson he said to me, "I hope he is still thinking," and when I questioned him he replied that Bergson's teaching up to this moment "suggests that anything may happen."

Here you may see one of the main movements of our day which call, in the Dean's judgment for unpleasantness--the unpleasantness of telling people not to make fools of themselves. Humanity must not go over in a body to Mr. Micawber.

Anything may happen? No! We are not characters in a fairy tale, but men of reason, inhabiting a world which reveals to us at every point of our investigation one certain and unalterable fact--an unbroken uniformity of natural law. We must not dream; we must act, and, before we act, we must think. Human nature does not change very greatly. Bergson is apt to encourage easy optimism, to leave the door open for credulity, superst.i.tion, idle expectation; and he is disposed to set instinct above reason, "a very dangerous doctrine, at any rate for _this_ generation."

What is wrong with this generation? It is a generation that refuses to accept the rule and discipline of reason, which thinks it can reach millennium by a short cut, or jump to the moon in an excess of emotional fervour. It is a generation which becomes a crowd, and "individuals are occasionally guided by reason, crowds never." It is a generation which lives by catchwords, which plays tricks, which attempts to cut knots, which counts heads.

What is wrong with this generation? Public opinion is "a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man." Democracy means "a victory of sentiment over reason"; it is the triumph of the unfit, the ascendancy of the second-rate, the conquest of quality by quant.i.ty, the smothering of the hard and true under the feather-bed of the soft and the false.

Some may prefer the softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compa.s.sionate... .

Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that nature has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog and combines with his theoretical objection to capital punishment a l.u.s.t to murder all who disagree with him.

Beware of sentiment! Beware of it in politics, beware of it in religion.

See things as they are. Accept human nature for what it is. Consult history. Judge by reason and experience. Act with courage.

As he faces politics, so he faces religion.

He desires to rescue Christianity from all the sentimental vulgarities which have disfigured it in recent years--alike from the aesthetic extravagances of the ritualist and the organising fussiness of the evangelical; to rescue it from these obscuring unessentials, and to set it clearly before the eyes of mankind in the pure region of thought--a divine philosophy which teaches the only true science of life, a discipline which fits the Soul for its journey, "by an inner ascent," to the presence of G.o.d. Mysticism, he says, is the pursuit of ultimate, objective truth, or it is nothing.

Christianity demands the closest attention of the mind. It cannot be seen at a glance, understood in a moment, adopted by a gesture. It is a deep and profound philosophy of life. It proposes a transvaluation of values. It insists that the spiritual life is the only true life. It sets the invisible above the visible, and the eternal above the temporal. It tears up by the roots the l.u.s.t of acc.u.mulation. It brings man face to face with a choice that is his destiny. He must think, he must decide. He cannot serve both G.o.d and Mammon. Either his life must be given for the imperishable values of spiritual existence or for the meats that perish and the flesh that will see corruption. Let a man choose. Christianity contradicts all his natural ideas; but let him think, let him listen to the voice of G.o.d, and let him decide as a rational being. Let him not presume to set up his trivial notions, or to think that he can silence Truth by bawling falsehood at the top of his voice. Let him be humble. Let him listen to the teacher. Let him give all his attention to this great matter, for it concerns his soul.

Here again is the aristocratic principle. The average man, until he has disciplined his reason to understand this great matter, must hold his peace; certainly he must not presume to lay down the law.

When we exclaim against this doctrine, and speak with enthusiasm of the virtues of the poor, Dr. Inge asks us to examine those virtues and to judge of their worth. Among the poor, he quotes, "generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chast.i.ty, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation."

But we are to love G.o.d with all our _mind_, as well as with all our heart.

Does he, then, shut out the humble and the poor from the Kingdom of G.o.d?

Not for a moment. "Ultimately, we are what we love and care for, and no limit has been set to what we may become without ceasing to be ourselves." The door of love stands open, and through that doorway the poor and the ignorant may pa.s.s to find the satisfaction of the saint.

But they must be careful to love the right things--to love truth, goodness, and beauty. They must not be encouraged to sentimentalise; they must be bidden to decide. The poor can be debauched as easily as the rich. Many are called, but few chosen.

His main protest is against _the rule_ of the ignorant, the democratic principle applied to the _amor intellectualis Dei_. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, all must accept, with humility, the teaching of the Master. Plotinus, he points out, was the schoolmaster who brought Augustine to Christ. The greatest of us has to learn. He who would teach should be a learner all his life.

In everything he says and writes I find this desire to exalt Truth above the fervours of emotionalism and the dangerous drill of the formalist.

Always he is calling upon men to drop their prejudices and catchwords, to forsake their conceits and sentiments, to face Truth with a quiet pulse and eyes clear of all pa.s.sion. Christianity is a tremendous thing; let no man, believer or unbeliever, attempt to make light of it.

It is not compa.s.sion for the intellectual difficulties of the average man which has made Dr. Inge a conservative modernist, if so I may call him. Sentiment of no kind whatever has entered into the matter. He is a conservative modernist because his reason has convinced him of the truth of reasonable modernism, because he has "that intellectual honesty which dreads what Plato calls 'the lie in the soul' even more than the lie on the lips." He is a modernist because he is an intellectual ascetic.

When we compare his position with that of Dr. Gore we see at once the width of the gulf which separates the traditionalist from the philosopher. To Dr. Gore the creeds and the miracles are essential to Christianity. No Virgin Birth, no Sermon on the Mount! No Resurrection of the Body, no Parable of the Prodigal Son! No Descent into h.e.l.l, no revelation that the Kingdom of Heaven is within! Need we wonder that Dr.

Gore cries out despairingly for more discipline? He summons reason, it is true, but to defend and explain creeds without which there is no Christianity.

To Dr. Inge, on the other hand, it is what Christ said that matters, what He taught that demands our obedience, what He revealed that commands our love. Christianity for him is not a series of extraordinary acts, but a voice from heaven. It is not the Christ of tradition before whom he bows his knee, but the Christ of history, the Christ of faith, the Christ of experience--the living and therefore the evolving Christ.

And for him, as for the great majority of searching men, the more the mists of pious _aberglaube_ lift, the more real, the more fair, and the more divine becomes the Face of that living Christ, the more close the sense of His companions.h.i.+p.

A friend of mine once asked him, "Are you a Christian or a Neoplatonist?" He smiled. "It would be difficult to say," he replied.

He was thinking, I am sure, of Troeltsch's significant prophecy, and warning, that _the Future of Christian philosophy depends on the renewal of its alliance with Neoplatonism_.

Let no man suppose that the intellectual virtues are outside the range of religion. "Candour, moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities," says Baron von Hugel, "bear upon them the impress of G.o.d and His Christ."

What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own character. He speaks of "the intense honesty of the man, _who never s.h.i.+rks a difficulty or writes an insincere word_."

But though he is a.s.sociated in the popular mind chiefly with modernism, Dr. Inge is not by any means only a controversial theologian. Above and beyond everything else, he is a mystic. You may find indications of this truth even in a book like _Outspoken Essays_, but they are more numerous in his two little volumes, _The Church and the Age_ and _Speculum Animae_, and of course more numerous still in his great work on Plotinus[5]. He is far more a mystic than a modernist. Indeed I regard him as the Erasmus of modernism, one so sure of truth that he would trust time to work for his ideas, would avoid fighting altogether, but certainly all fighting that is in the least degree premature. The two thousand years of Christianity, he says somewhere, are no long period when we remind ourselves that G.o.d spent millions of years in moulding a bit of old red sandstone.

[Footnote 5: "I have often thought that the unquestionable inferiority of German literature about Platonism points to an inherent defect in the German mind."--_The Philosophy of Plotinus_, p. 13]

Meanwhile we have our c.o.c.ksure little guides, some of whom say to us, "That is primitive, therefore it is good," and others, "This is up-to-date, therefore it is better." Not very wise persons any of them, I fear.

And again, writing of Catholic Modernism in France:

We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M. Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the Kingdom of G.o.d which Christ preached was something much more than a platonic dream. We believe that He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the object of our wors.h.i.+p was a historical figure.

I will give a few extracts from _Speculum Animae_, a most valuable and most beautiful little book, which show the true bent of his mind:

On all questions _about_ religion there is the most distressing divergency. But the saints do not contradict each other.

Prayer ... is "the elevation of the mind and heart to G.o.d." It is in prayer, using the word in this extended sense, that we come into immediate contact with the things that cannot be shaken.

Are we to set against such plain testimony the pessimistic agnosticism of a voluptuary like Omar Khayyam?

_There was the Door to which I found no Key_... .

May it not be that the door has no key because it has no lock?

The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed.

The life of Christ was throughout a life of prayer. Not only did He love to spend many hours in lonely communing with His Father, on the mountain-tops, which He was perhaps the first to love, and to choose for this purpose, but His whole life was spent in habitual realisation of G.o.d's presence.

Religion is caught rather than taught; it is the religious teacher, not the religious lesson, that helps the pupil to believe.

What we love, that we see; and what we see, that we are.

We need above all things to simplify our religion and our inner life generally.

We want to separate the essential from the nonessential, to concentrate our faith upon the pure G.o.d-consciousness, the eternal world which to Christ was so much nearer and more real than the world of external objects.

Christ meant us to be happy, happier than any other people.

It is because he is so profoundly convinced of the mystical truth of Christianity, because he has so honestly tried and so richly experienced that truth as a philosophy of life, it is because of this, and not out of a lack of sympathy with the sad and sorrowful, that he opposes himself to the obscurantism of the Anglo-Catholic and the emotional economics of the political reformer.

"The Christian cure," he says, "is the only real cure." The socialist is talking in terms of the old currency, the currency of the world's quant.i.tative standards; but Christ introduced a new currency, which demonetises the old. Spiritual goods are unlimited in amount; they are increased by being shared; and we rob n.o.body by taking them. He believes with Creighton that "Socialism will only be possible when we are all perfect, and then it will not be needed."

In the meantime, "Christianity increases the wealth of the world by creating new values." Only in the currency of Christ can true socialism hope to pay its way.

We miss the heart and centre of his teaching if we forget for a moment that it is his conviction of the sufficiency of Christ's revelation which makes him so deadly a critic both of the ritualist and the socialist--two terms which on the former side at least tend to become synonymous. He would have no distraction from the mystery of Christ, no compromise of any kind in the world's loyalty to its one Physician.

Simplify your dogmas; simplify your theologies. Christ is your one essential.

I have spoken to him about psychical research and the modern interest in spiritualism. "I don't think much of _that!_" he replied. Then, in a lower key, "It was not through animism and necromancy that the Jews came to believe in immortality." How did they reach that belief? "By thinking things out, and asking the question, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"