SECTARIANISM AND SECULARIZATION.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR.")
8111,—Give mo leave to say with what deep regret and astonishment I observe that you have given the weighty sanction of the Spectator to the project which your correspondent "J." suggested in your issue of February 19th, and which Mr. Edgar Rogers in your last issue tells us is already being adopted. To organize the Army as far as possible on a sect-basis is ultimately to withdraw from the extra-sectarian residuum—that is, from the Army as a whole— its strongest moral and religious elements, and to isolate these, professedly in their own interest, but really to their exceeding injury. This policy, I repeat, implies a gradual secularizing of the Army, unintended of course, but as certain as the sequence of cause and effect. Such secularization, I submit, would not only injure the Army by a process of morel impoverishment, but also would injure even the segregated sectarians themselves by withdrawing them from the larger experience and more generous fellowship of the common life.
It is matter of very deep regret that the military authorities have encouraged this sectarian project. I know, of course, that their difficulties are very great, and that they must needs be reluctant to discourage any proposal which promises to assist recruiting, especially when it is urged by religious and responsible men in the pretended interest of the recruits. Nevertheless I am persuaded that they have taken a false step, and are moving in the wrong direction.
Tho sectarian tendency is running very strongly just now through- out English Christianity. Your contemporary the Church Times (which certainly expresses a great volume of clerical opinion) is filled with "flouts and gibes and sneers" directed against every form of non-sectarian Christianity. In its pages, and elsewhere, the venerable word " Catholic " has become acutely and aggressively
sectarian. Publio School religion is denounced, and "Church Parades" (the familiar symbol of Army religion) are derided. At
all hazards, it would seem, the Army, like the State, is to be secularized. Religion is to be wholly an affair of the individual, transacted within the sect of his own choice.
The sectarian argument is as familiar as it is fallacious. A "hot centre" of perfervid devotion is to be created, which, like the fire of
a central hearth, shall warm the whole society. But that is not
truo to experience. It reverses the order of history and contradicts the method of the Gospel. Christ suggested this by His familiar
metaphors. "Salt," leaven," "light," "the wheat and the tares," "the drag-net," the "kingdom "—all disallow the attractive and persistent error which would isolate Christians from the general life, and emphasize every element of their religion which has an unusual or uninviting aspect.
You refer to those famous fighting names, the " Ironsides " and the "Maccabees." The last may be dismissed as irrelevant, for Jews arc not Christians, and when Christians follow Jewish models they fall into the oldest and worst of the heresies. The " Ironsides " stand for sectarianism, militant, destructive, finally fanatical and anarchic. They can provide no precedent for the British Army, in which the fundamental unity of Imperial mind and purpose finds its supreme instrument. Moreover, is it not certain that the ribaldry and profligacy of the Cavaliers were stimulated by the parade of goodness which marked the Puritans ? And did not the Puritans themselves decline quickly from enthusiasm into morose- ness, and even fall from moral severity into the crudest hypocrisy ? The mischiefs which your correspondent "J." bewails in the Army will finally be emphasized and extended by a policy which with- draws from every regiment tho very men in it who are most con- sistently and deliberately religious. He appeals to Indian precedents. "It seems extraordinary that in a so-called Christian land nothing of this sort is attempted or suggested, when it is well known that the factor which vivifies the best Indian regiments, such as the Sikhs and the Pathans, is the binding power of a common religion."
And are the sects of Christianity, then, rightly to be treated as so many independent religions, the members of which cannnot be safely associated together ? This is sectarianism regnant and absolute. Is it indeed the case that Christianity is to conform to
the type of the Oriental religions ? Is the Religion of Humanity to shrink to the pinched category of merely tribal, national, and local cults ? And on the practical issue, does the Indian Army gain strength and cohesion from those fierce and limited creeds, which bend even discipline to their interest ? Sectarianism is a kind of half-way house to paganism. We shall, perhaps, soon have proposals to effect the conversion of India by fitting on Western sects to the native castes !
I do most earnestly protest against the adoption, on however petty a scale, of a policy which begins by sectarianizing the soldier's Christianity and ends by secularizing the Army.—I am, Sir, &c., [We own to being completely converted by the Dean of Durham's powerfulent. We want the Church and the Army to be as national as he We were only thinking of temporary units in the New Army, and not of battalions after the war, but we admit, as Cromwell would have said, that ours were "carnal thoughts," even as regards battalions "for the duration."—ED. Spectator.]
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