Christianity and Conduct : I. Is the Ideal Practical ?
By Canon F. R. BARRY [This is the first of two articles by Canon Barry introducing a short series to which. Lord Hugh Cecil, The Bishop of Bradford and other writers are contributing.] • THE centre of interest in religious discussion is shifting from Theology to Ethics. The question about " Science and Religion," in its speculative fdrm, is becoming outworn. It is being raised, rather, in terms of conduct. The pressure of circumstances is 'forcing back a harassed generation on to immediate practical issues. Life is too exacting and insistent and the demand of action too urgent to leave men leisure or taste for speculation. Men and brethren, what shall we do? is the real question of the nineteen-thirties. Religiously this means a revived demand for a prac- ticable personal religion, and a concern with "religious experience " which may even evince a contempt for " theology." Morally, it means that the Christian Church has to face an objective and relentless, though by no means always unfriendly, scrutiny as regards the validity of its ethical values and the sincerity of its moral teaching. It has not so much to substantiate its theology as to vindicate itself as a way of living.
The effect of the war years, and their dreadful conse- quences on the minds and spirits of those who have passed through them, have been very admirably inter- preted in Miss Brittain's Testament of Youth. The old loyalties were wounded to death. The old moral and spiritual landmarks were obliterated in suffering and despair. The traditional values seemed to be discredited, their sanctions shattered and faith strained to breaking- point. The familiar world of the last generation seemed to vanish in utter disillusionment, and the younger men and women groped their way, cruelly hurt and morally bewildered, into the cold and ambiguous dawn of the challenging and chaotic nineteen-twenties. Many found the ordeal too much for them. Miss Brittain herself came bravely. through, disillusioned, reticent, but free ; taught by experience, armed with realism, equipped with naked biological knowledge, and a strong hope in a rational human futtire. • That is, in effect, the Scientific Humanism which has been described as " the religion of educated people under forty." It 'seemed to be full of promiSe and reasoned confidence. Belief in God may have been shat- tered, yet she could still hold on to belief in man. But that faith, which seemed almost till yesterday to be so of hope and promise, is already tumbling about our ears. Faith in human nature is less easy. The ideals of liberal Humanitarianism are being defeated at point after point. A cyclone of reaction is in full blast. There is a growing distrust of freedom, which seems to spring frorn an increasing scepticism about human nature and its possibilities. The faith that was to have led to a new order is now itself being broken and discredited. Once more we must seek for a new moral dynamic, a faith to inspire creative reconstruction, and resist the wearing- down process of inertia, disappointment and futility.
Can the Christian ethic meet the world's need ? - Amid some hope there is also much scepticism about its ability to survive the test.
On the one hand, the widespread disillusionment with the prescriptions of economic experts, and the sense of futility which invests politics, are driving men back with an almost desperate urgency on the need for moral and Spiritual leadership. On the other hand, the impression is widespread that traditional Christian " morality is now a discredited and outworn programine, which has served its turn but is now played 'out. It survives but as a picturesque anachronism, like the Lord Mayor's coach or the Bishop's gaiters, and can offer no effective contribution to . the social and moral needs of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that this is the suggestion which the public accepts from its best- known instructors. As a guide to the civilization of the future the Christian ethic is set aside. Scientific Hu- manism distrusts it. Writers like Mr. Wells have de- spaired of it. That strange mixture of Freud and Greek Cynicism which goes by the name of the New Morality pours on it contemptuous derision. Fiction and Drama treat it as an Aunt Sally : the bell rings every time you hit it. What are the causes of this corroding scepticism ?
Much of it is due to sheer misunderstanding and sonic to wilful misrepresentation. Those who attack Christian theology are, very often, attacking beliefs which arc held by no educated Christians ; and the critics are them- selves often culpable for their ignorance of what they profess to criticize. Similarly, the attack on the Christian ethic is often based (whether or not deliberately) on some appallingly obscurantist utterance by one of its least qualified exponents. Thus we find pilloried as " Christian morality " an attitude or a standard of conduct against which the genuine Christian ethic is in fact pledged and eager to protest. But Christians themselves are partly to blame for this. We have been too prone to equate Christian ethics with outworn codes of respectability which the modern conscience, rightly perhaps, repudiates. We have, for instance, given the impression that the Christian ideal of family life is bound up with the English divorce law, with its cruelties and its ignominious subter- fuges. We have thus led many sincere people to identify " Christian " morals with cruelty ; and perhaps nothing has done more than this to bring the Christian standard into contempt.
Some of it, also, is due to disappointment. There arc many, chiefly among the younger people, who have made up their minds regretfully yet decisively that the moral outlook of Christianity is so irremediably tainted with privilege, nationalism, and exploitation as to forfeit its title to offer guidance to an honest and open-eyed genera- tion. They have looked to it and it has seemed to fail them ; and therefore they turn upon it and seek to smash it with the anger of disappointed enrages. And in this, again, there is just enough truth to summon Christians to repentance.
But beyond these more obvious reasons there is, I believe, one that goes deeper, and it is with this that in these articles I am chiefly and directly concerned. It is, perhaps, the practical form of the " religion and science" debate. It is the idea that a religious ethic, based on an " otherworldly " allegiance, must be inconsistent and in- compatible with the " scientific " morality of prevision, planning, and reconstruction which are needed to shape the patterns of the new order. Our young men and women are out-and-out realists. Romanticism makes no appeal to them. Warm rhetoric and vague uplift, un- harnessed to any machinery for action, arc what this generation most despises. Sentimentalism, in morals or religion, is the one sin for which it has no forgiveness. It must therefore be shoWn, on behalf of the Christian ethic, not only that its ideal is valid, but that it is actual and realistic like the straight lines of our steel and concrete architecture. For admittedly no ethic can live which. ignores the conditions of • the world it lives in.
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