NATIONAL IDEALISM AND RELIGION
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sm,—As one of the so-called Bright Young Things who has' thought about this question of religion, I was very interested in Dr. Relton's letter, asking what is wrong with the working of organised religion today. In my opinion it is organised religion itself, not its working, which is Wrong.
We of the younger generation demand chiefly three things of life : realism, originality, and the power to develop our individuality along the finest lines. It seems that organised religion insists on the suffocation of all these. We are told to have faith in unseen links which are said to exist between here and the unknown and unknowable hereafter; we must worship through obsolete forms and dogmas nearly 2,000 years old ; we must be content with our minute part in a huge band of humble, righteous people, with God (a creation of man's imagination) a.s_their permanent leader. All our trials will then be rewarded in heaven.
We cannot believe• in those things. We are. materialists, living in a material world. We arc self-seekers, brought up in an atmosphere, both international and economic, of " cads man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost." And we have found, through rather bitter experience, that the only person who Will.never desert us is ourself. Hence our religion of self_-cOnfidence• ; Our God (for we are not godless as so many older .people would believe) is our own higher and better self. Yet, while We" are self-seeking we arc not selfish. The chief commands of our GM are to hive one another and to be of use to the world. To do either of these we must be masters of ourselves, • knowing and improVing ourselves each day. We respect, and try to live up to, many of the principles of life laid down by Christ, but we cannot forget that these principles did not originate with him. They are human principles which started far, -far back in almost prehistoric times. Read Confucius' teachings written about 500 years before Christ, and compare them with the New Testament. Many of the precepts are identical.
It seems to me that the task of the Church today is not to force people to believe in God and Heaven, two things which no human can prove logicallY. Let it bring within our reach instead the material beauty which lies in the world- I educate us to appreciate the lovely art, music and literature which human minds have created through contact iwkth.the visible world of nature and men. It was not belief in any God which guided the hand of the Greek sculptor or the Chinese pottery-worker, it was the divinity in human nature. Let the Church educate its people to a sensitive understanding and appreciation of that divinity, let it teach them to develop it within themselves without the so-called aid of any God, but through the example of great artists who knevi how to live and how to create. The world we know, through the live senses we have been given is so full of wonder, help us to appreciate its beauty, and do not muddle our minds or wrap us in the cotton-wool of imagination.
We of the younger generation, who cry for freedom to develop, cry also for wisdom to understand the overwhelming beauty which lies around us., And you can only: point us to huge woolly clouds on the horizon behind.
I agree with Dr. Belton when he says that we can no longer live "on the spiritual capital of our forefathers." Has the Church the courage teach us to love and understand the material beauty of life, or must we be forced to believe es fact the imaginings of our forefathers ?=Yourstruly,
65 Ennismore Gardens, S.
PATRICIA GILBERT-LODGE.
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