A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

-AMATEUR RELIGIONS

My Religion. Articles from the Daily Express. (Hutchison.

2s. 6d. net.)

IT is no use blaming the Daily Express ; in fact, we might rather compliment and praise it. If the centre of guidance

and discussion, even upon the profoundest questions of mankind, shifts in our day from the pulpit to the Press, then we can hardly give all the blame to the newspapers. Of 'course we shall find no :very searching thought applied to the discussion ; not overmuch attention will be called to our legacy of wisdom from the past ; there will be no especial ,feeling of responsibility. We may feel in ourselves, " If these mysteries cannot be touched with seriousness and ireverence, then it is best to leave them untouched." But the fact is that there are millions of people in England now who would ordinarily live without a notion that there are mysteries in life ; and it is better that they should be moved shallowly and triflingly than that they should not be moved at all. These problems, " Is there a significance in life ? " " Is religion true ? " Am I in any sense immortal ? " have power to deepen the soul wherever they are raised. A relativist 'might assert that the attempt to discover significance in life by itself provides the significance of life.

Yet we must admit it to be a tragedy that these articles were written by men and women whose talents and ardours were "notparticularly suited for religious guidance. They are all in some degree famous ; but that is quite irrelevant : they are not famous for the acuity of their religious perceptions or the persistence with which they have wrestled to discover the truth. Possibly they may represent the " average thoughtful man " more explicitly than he could represent 'himself ; but the average " thoughtful man" is not thoughtful enough to enrich us greatly by his faith or his speculation. Consider the list of contributors :—Arnold Bennett, Hugh :Walpole, Rebecca West, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, Israel . Zangwill, H. de Vere Stacpoole, Henry Arthur Jones. It is not that we would say a word against any of them in this connexion ; it is only that we feel we could not gain any extraordinary illumination from so haphazard a collection, chosen to speak

• for inconsequent reasons and all of them amateurs—amateurs 'in religion or amateurs in atheism.

• The master of a Chinese school of Buddhism used to set to every applicant for his teaching this single question, " And what do you come to me for ? " Perhaps the would-be student would answer that he wished to escape from the wheel of reincarnation, or to discover the meaning of life. He would be dismissed and told not to come back till he had found a better answer. Day after day (if he were of sufficient energy and patience) he would come back with a new answer. He would say that he wished to be taught right action, or the eightfold path ; or to learn to attain self-mastery or to become Arahat. And each time he would be sent away ; till, if he had a taint of weakness in his purpose, after months or years of disappointment he would set off elsewhere in despair. Never would he be admitted to the school until he had found, as we may call it, the password. •

Now the password here (as a good Buddhist would finally see) was " Nothing." And though in Europe we should - think nothing a sad purpose to have, at any rate the tale

affords an excellent parable of the resolved and analysed frame of mind in which a man may discover the truth in ielig,ious questions. We have the same tale in the lives of our Western saints, with a new, Western orientation. If human effort is entirely exhausted, if our wrestling with truth has brought us to the very pit of insufficiency and despair, it is then, precisely at that moment when no answer is forth- coming, that the first step of value can be taken, that illumin-

ation comes of itself. And the man who can discuss religion with knowledge and with a new impetus is one who at some

time in his life has- so beggared himself and confessed his failure. Until that realization we may talk intelligently, we may even rouse men to think for themselves, but the imparting of truth, in any form or degree, is impossible. -

_ Meanwhile even the slightest approach to the most seriona questions of our being gives us at least an added dignity and makes us at least try to find out our underlying opinions. It is notable in this symposium that all the writers arc better than we might expect them to be ; that none of them is flippant. Obviously it has cost them more trouble to-write upon this subject than the ordinary casual article -would demand. Where we do not obtain light we can apply our- selves to analysis and try to find out why one man believes this and another believes that. We can see, too, some kind of unanimity in the methods of approach.

Almost all these writers, for example, have a horror of dogma and an admiration for charity. Most of them begin with the assumption that Jesus was a good man, and not with the assumption that He was divine. If they conclude (as few of them do, except in a very qualified and liberal fashion) that He was in fact divine, it is only because He seems to them to have been so very good. This, we may remark, is a position most expressly discouraged in the New Testament itself, and by our Lord Himself. Miss Rebecca West may be quoted for a typical anti-dogmatic paragraph :-

" The ordinary pre-Christian man was not accustomed to the idea of moral power unsupported by force." [It is a mistake of Miss West's to put the newness of Christianity in the doctrine of non-resistance : we can instance the Buddha, Plato, Lao-Tzo, or a hundred other pre-Christian teachers.] " It would have been impossible to convince him that a man was divine simply because his behaviour was supremely beautiful. Therefore, Christ had to be recommended to him by the ascription of a miraculous origin. Now that we have had Christ's lesson set before us this is quite unnecessary."

Mr. Arnold Bennett is still more fiercely anti-dogmatic. He lets us deduce that his position is merely the result of his circumstances. He was brought up amongst the very bleak and ill-considered dogmas of forty years ago, and he has revolted against them quite naively and antithetically. He, too, would substitute the good heart for religion :—

" What will take the place of dogmatic Christianity I cannot guess. But I have a conviction that whatever it is, if it is not based on kindliness it will fail."

Even Mr. Phillips Oppenheim comes to much the same con- clusion :—

" We are few of us heroes, we all have our weaknesses, but it is always possible in yielding to them to sacrifice as little as may be the happiness of others."

Whence does all this hostility to dogma rise ? Partly, no doubt, from the conception of dogma which even the Church is not at sufficient pains to avoid—that it is something that cannot be explained or made active to the intelligence. But undoubtedly it comes more from our modern individualistri.

We find it difficult to believe that St. Augustine understood his own meanings and knew in what way his words were to be applied. We have lost respect for the mental equipment of our ancestors, and it does not seem to us that a doctrine which has exercised and satisfied several generations of men, which has been lived through and confirmed for centuries, has therefore a peculiar, a perpetual claim upon our attention. In this quarrel, " I " against the authority of the Church, then " I " am blindly to be followed. Now let us admit that, if we are to be honest in our Protestant inheritance, we shall not be content to be Christians with unresolved and sup- pressed hesitations. And yet it might well seem to us that, if our own minds are in conflict on the subject of religion with the tradition of Christianity, then we should take it for granted that we ourselves are wrong : or at least use this as an hypothesis for exploration.

The truth is, of course, that dogma is not blind assertion ; it is the central formulation of intuitions. A dogmatic has done us the greatest of services : he has said, in effect, " Here ' is a statement that I would stake my life is true. This is myself and my own intuition in its most concentrated essence." Dogma goes wrong only if a man or a Church proceeds to say " My intuition—or my revelation—must be accepted super- stitiously and without understanding." And why should a man complain against dogma if he keeps his own independ- ence and integrity ? Should he not, even if he disagrees, be grateful to have these central and economical formulations of the spiritual certainties of other men ?

It is interesting to see that many of the writers tend to identify the problem of the existence of God with the problem of personal immortality ; and it is nevertheless general that,

in so far as they separate them, they are more inclined to believe in their own individual survival than in the -eternal ground of their hopes. This is the mark of unchastened

and disorganized thinking—to look at problems first as they affect oneself. Belief in immortality, advocacy of huniane conduct, admiration of Christian ethics, have nothing to recommend them if they are not based upon an intuition of the purpose of the universe. The first reason should come first.

And so there is not really much to be gained from these articles except a sympathy for our fellow-mortals, floundering among great issues as ineffectively as ourselves. It might well turn out that Mr. Arnold Bennett's article was the most useful ; for he is the easiest to convict of shallowness. In a second article, an apologetic for his first, he sums up his criticisms of the Christian religion :-

" I have discovered nothing in the Bible to convince me of the divine origin of Christian doctrine as inculcated either to-day or fourteen hundred years ago ; and the number of people in my case has been rapidly increasing for many decades and is still increasing."

" I am my own witness," said the Christ.

J. R.