Comradeship
l'he Religion of an Optimist. By Hamilton Fyfe. (Parsons. los. Sit.)
"THE Lamb, the Lamb, the Bleeding Lamb, Glory to the Bleeding Lamb ''—so runs part of a Salvation Army hymn; and it is against "such sacrificial horrors- of ancient and savage theogony " that Mr. Fyfe lifts up his voice. Let not the orthodox and conventionally pious believcOn that account that Mr. Fyfe is blasphemer or atheist. He is not that, he is Very far from that : through everything he writes runs a Strain of believing faith in the simple Christian ethic—he laasks in the sunshine of hope irradiated by all that Christ taught, and the prevailing note in his book is its strong sincerity.
. True it is that nuich of what he writes will shock and irritate the conventional and the respectable, but it is sometimes good that such should be violently jolted and irritated, just as we have it on the authority of David Harum that "a reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog, keeps him from brooding on being a dog." Let us then regard Mr. Fyfe as a flea on the hide of society, and consider, at short length, and with the minimum of comment, the method of, and the grounds for, his irritation.
First of all he arraigns what he calls "time mumbo-jumbo of organized Christianity," which, thanks "to the misty neo- Platonism of St. Paul," has devitalized the real teaching of Christ, and has made of it but a profession divorced from practice. As such it has, he considers, lost its grip on humanity, which asks for a faith that shall supply a working principle for social life. Man indeed hungers for a religion, something more than a philosophical or supernatural concept, which shall be to him a tie to link him to his fellow-creatures. Science cannot supply this, nor Art, which has become severed from life. Real Christianity, a religion of social duty based on the teaching of Christ, has never been tried either by indi- viduals in the mass or by nations, and so very much individual effort has been wasted by professing Christians in the saving of their own souls without regard to their relations to others. Let us then try Christianity in action, let us try the Golden Rule which Jesus gave us that we should do as we would be done by. In this new faith (if it be new) "there must be no theology, none of the dogmas picked off the scrap-heap of Hebrew and Greek ideas." Much less is it to represent "the tastes and prejudices of the English gentleman," which is the
ideal of the Anglican Church as defined. by Dean Inge, but it is to be a religion of Comradeship (Caritas), nation-wide and world-wide, which shall illustrate the words of Spinoza (next to Jesus the greatest teacher the world has produced), when lie said that" the only unmistakable tokens of the true Catholic
faith and the true fruits of the Holy Spirit are Justice and Comradeship."
Comradeship, then, and a greater simplicity in life—`• one standard of life for all "—this is the message which Mr. Fyfe has to deliver. It would be easy enough to sneer at his gospel, and point out that he never indicates any practical means of bringing it to pass. It would be easy enough to reflect on his many inconsistencies, as when he tells us that he is no "great believer in organization" (p. 139), and yet looks forward to the day when State Management will become "very much enlarged" (p. 182) ; or when on one page he informs us that in America there is "a more genuine sentiment of national comradeship" than in Europe, and on another that "the divisions of society in America have become more marked than they are in England." There is also too much vague writing like "What the world needs badly is a religion based on a sound knowledge of human nature." But surely no one will venture to impugn the attitude of a man who asks us to practise a religion which calls for "behaviour instead of belief." Is there not prevalent to-day a tendency to confess despairingly with Clough that :—
"This world is very odd, we see ; We cannot comprehend it ; But on one thing we all agree,
God won't and we can't mend it.
Being common-sense, it can't be sin To take it as we find it,—
The pleasure, to take pleasure in, 'The pain, try not to mind it" ?
Against such an ignoble view Mr. Fyfe has set up a nobly resistive ideal.
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