Akin to that case is the perplexity of any successful physician
between the increase of knowledge and the public welfare on the one
hand, and the lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy
people on the other. He belongs to a profession that is crippled by
a mediaeval code, a profession which was blind to the common
interest of the Public Health and regarded its members merely as
skilled practitioners employed to “cure” individual ailments. Very
slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt
themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men
working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole,
broadening out from the frowsy den of the “leech,” with its
crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled
and illuminating cooperation with those who deal with the food and
housing and economic life of the community.
And again quite parallel with these personal problems is the trouble
of the artist between the market and vulgar fame on the one hand and
his divine impulse on the other.
The presence of God will be a continual light and help in every
decision that must be made by men and women in these more or less
vitiated, but still fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.
The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a
man who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business
enterprise or the proprietor of great estates. The world is in need
of manufactures and that goods should be distributed; land must be
administered and new economic possibilities developed. The drift of
things is in the direction of state ownership and control, but in a
great number of cases the state is not ripe for such undertakings,
it commands neither sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and
the proprietor of factory, store, credit or land, must continue in
possession, holding as a trustee for God and, so far as lies in his
power, preparing for his supersession by some more public
administration. Modern religion admits of no facile flights from
responsibility. It permits no headlong resort to the wilderness and
sterile virtue. It counts the recluse who fasts among scorpions in
a cave as no better than a deserter in hiding. It unhesitatingly
forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the
poor. Himself and all that he has must be alike dedicated to God.
The plain duty that will be understood by the proprietor of land and
of every sort of general need and service, so soon as he becomes
aware of God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve the
maximum of possible efficiency, the most generous output, and the
least private profit. He may set aside a salary for his
maintenance; the rest he must deal with like a zealous public
official. And if he perceives that the affair could be better
administered by other hands than his own, then it is his business to
get it into those hands with the smallest delay and the least profit
to himself… .
The rights and wrongs of human equity are very different from right
and wrong in the sight of God. In the sight of God no landlord has
a RIGHT to his rent, no usurer has a RIGHT to his interest. A man
is not justified in drawing the profits from an advantageous
agreement nor free to spend the profits of a speculation as he will.
God takes no heed of savings nor of abstinence. He recognises no
right to the “rewards of abstinence,” no right to any rewards.
Those profits and comforts and consolations are the inducements that
dangle before the eyes of the spiritually blind. Wealth is an
embarrassment to the religious, for God calls them to account for
it. The servant of God has no business with wealth or power except
to use them immediately in the service of God. Finding these things
in his hands he is bound to administer them in the service of God.
The tendency of modern religion goes far beyond the alleged
communism of the early Christians, and far beyond the tithes of the
scribes and Pharisees. God takes all. He takes you, blood and
bones and house and acres, he takes skill and influence and
expectations. For all the rest of your life you are nothing but
God’s agent. If you are not prepared for so complete a surrender,
then you are infinitely remote from God. You must go your way.
Here you are merely a curious interloper. Perhaps you have been
desiring God as an experience, or covetmg him as a possession. You
have not begun to understand. This that we are discussing in this
book is as yet nothing for you.
7. ADJUSTING LIFE
This picturing of a human world more to the mind of God than this
present world and the discovery and realisation of one’s own place
and work in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next phase
in the development of the believer. He will set about revising and
adjusting his scheme of life, his ways of living, his habits and his
relationships in the light of his new convictions.
Most men and women who come to God will have already a certain
righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap
only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the
mind that have brought them to God will already have brought their
lives into a certain rightness of direction and conduct. Yet
occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that
follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of
living. It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing
nothing but follow a pleasurable routine. Or to someone following
some highly profitable and amusing, but socially useless or socially
mischievous occupation. One may be an advocate at the disposal of
any man’s purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with any
theatrical enterprise. Or a woman may find herself a prostitute or
a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of indulgence. These are lives
of prey, these are lives of futility; the light of God will not
tolerate such lives. Here religion can bring nothing but a
severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and a
struggle towards use and service and dignity.
But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong
the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the
old. Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being
is in the self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a
knowledge of evil ways should not determine the path of duty. No
one can better devise protections against vices than those who have
practised them; none know temptations better than those who have
fallen. If a man has followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use
his knowledge of the tricks of that trade to help end it. He knows
the charities it may claim and the remedies it needs… .
A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of
adjustment is that of the barrister. A practising barrister under
contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the
opportunity for examining the relation of an ordinary self-respecting wordly life, to life under the dispensation of God
discovered. A barrister is usually a man of some energy and
ambition, his honour is moulded by the traditions of an ancient and
antiquated profession, instinctively self-preserving and yet with a
real desire for consistency and respect. As a profession it has
been greedy and defensively conservative, but it has never been
shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large and
selfish, but quite definite, propositions. It has never for
instance had the shamelessness of such a traditionless and
undisciplined class as the early factory organisers. It has never
had the dull incoherent wickedness of the sort of men who exploit
drunkenness and the turf. It offends within limits. Barristers can
be, and are, disbarred. But it is now a profession extraordinarily
out of date; its code of honour derives from a time of cruder and
lower conceptions of human relationship. It apprehends the State as
a mere “ring” kept about private disputations; it has not begun to
move towards the modern conception of the collective enterprise as
the determining criterion of human conduct. It sees its business as
a mere play upon the rules of a game between man and man, or between
men and men. They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer
wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and
compensations. The primary business of the law is held to be
decision in these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic
elaboration, the business of the barrister is the business of a