insufficiency; that is not to make out that there is a class of
essential and incurable spiritual defectives. The religious life
preceded clear religious understanding and extends far beyond its
range.
In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to
true belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing.
The essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere.
I am passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear in my own
mind, and to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and
particularly to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I
do perceive that error is evil if only because a faith based on
confused conceptions and partial understandings may suffer
irreparable injury through the collapse of its substratum of ideas.
I doubt if faith can be complete and enduring if it is not secured
by the definite knowledge of the true God. Yet I have also to admit
that I find the form of my own religious emotion paralleled by
people with whom I have no intellectual sympathy and no agreement in
phrase or formula at all.
There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling
and this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as
myself and a convert of the Salvation Army. Here, clothing itself
in phrases and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs
and fountains of precious blood, a most repulsive and
incomprehensible idiom to me, and expressing itself by shouts,
clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and rhythmic pacings that stun
and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object sought, release from
self, and the same end, the end of identification with the immortal,
successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved. I see God
indubitably present in these excitements, and I see personalities I
could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for spiritual
understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity. One may
be led into the absurdest underestimates of religious possibilities
if one estimates people only coldly and in the light of everyday
life. There is a sub-intellectual religious life which, very
conceivably, when its utmost range can be examined, excludes nothing
human from religious cooperation, which will use any words to its
tune, which takes its phrasing ready-made from the world about it,
as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its
inner point in the directest contact with God. Religion may suffer
from aphasia and still be religion; it may utter misleading or
nonsensical words and yet intend and convey the truth. The methods
of the Salvation Army are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may
long survive it. Men and women may still chant of Beulah Land and
cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the tambourine, that modern
revival of the thrilling Alexandrine sistrum, may still stir dull
nerves to a first apprehension of powers and a call beyond the
immediate material compulsion of life, when the creeds of
Christianity are as dead as the lore of the Druids.
The emancipation of mankind from obsolete theories and formularies
may be accompanied by great tides of moral and emotional release
among types and strata that by the standards of a trained and
explicit intellectual, may seem spiritually hopeless. It is not
necessary to imagine the whole world critical and lucid in order to
imagine the whole world unified in religious sentiment,
comprehending the same phrases and coming together regardless of
class and race and quality, in the worship and service of the true
God. The coming kingship of God if it is to be more than hieratic
tyranny must have this universality of appeal. As the head grows
clear the body will turn in the right direction. To the mass of men
modern religion says, “This is the God it has always been in your
nature to apprehend.”
11. GOD AND THE LOVE AND STATUS OF WOMEN
Now that we are discussing the general question of individual
conduct, it will be convenient to take up again and restate in that
relationship, propositions already made very plainly in the second
and third chapters. Here there are several excellent reasons for a
certain amount of deliberate repetition… .
All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity, and the like with
religion, those questions of physical status that play so large a
part in most contemporary religions, have disappeared from modern
faith. Let us be as clear as possible upon this. God is concerned
by the health and fitness and vigour of his servants; we owe him our
best and utmost; but he has no special concern and no special
preferences or commandments regarding sexual things.
Christ, it is manifest, was of the modern faith in these matters, he
welcomed the Magdalen, neither would he condemn the woman taken in
adultery. Manifestly corruption and disease were not to stand
between him and those who sought God in him. But the Christianity
of the creeds, in this as in so many respects, does not rise to the
level of its founder, and it is as necessary to repeat to-day as
though the name of Christ had not been ascendant for nineteen
centuries, that sex is a secondary thing to religion, and sexual
status of no account in the presence of God. It follows quite
logically that God does not discriminate between man and woman in
any essential things. We leave our individuality behind us when we
come into the presence of God. Sex is not disavowed but forgotten.
Just as one’s last meal is forgotten—which also is a difference
between the religious moment of modern faith and certain Christian
sacraments. You are a believer and God is at hand to you; heed not
your state; reach out to him and he is there. In the moment of
religion you are human; it matters not what else you are, male or
female, clean or unclean, Hebrew or Gentile, bond or free. It is
AFTER the moment of religion that we become concerned about our
state and the manner in which we use ourselves.
We have to follow our reason as our sole guide in our individual
treatment of all such things as food and health and sex. God is the
king of the whole world, he is the owner of our souls and bodies and
all things. He is not particularly concerned about any aspect,
because he is concerned about every aspect. We have to make the
best use of ourselves for his kingdom; that is our rule of life.
That rule means neither painful nor frantic abstinences nor any
forced way of living. Purity, cleanliness, health, none of these
things are for themselves, they are for use; none are magic, all are
means. The sword must be sharp and clean. That does not mean that
we are perpetually to sharpen and clean it—which would weaken and
waste the blade. The sword must neither be drawn constantly nor
always rusting in its sheath. Those who have had the wits and soul
to come to God, will have the wits and soul to find out and know
what is waste, what is vanity, what is the happiness that begets
strength of body and spirit, what is error, where vice begins, and
to avoid and repent and recoil from all those things that degrade.
These are matters not of the rule of life but of the application of
life. They must neither be neglected nor made disproportionally
important.
To the believer, relationship with God is the supreme relationship.
It is difficult to imagine how the association of lovers and friends
can be very fine and close and good unless the two who love are each
also linked to God, so that through their moods and fluctuations and
the changes of years they can be held steadfast by his undying
steadfastness. But it has been felt by many deep-feeling people
that there is so much kindred between the love and trust of husband
and wife and the feeling we have for God, that it is reasonable to
consider the former also as a sacred thing. They do so value that
close love of mated man and woman, they are so intent upon its
permanence and completeness and to lift the dear relationship out of
the ruck of casual and transitory things, that they want to bring
it, as it were, into the very presence and assent of God. There are
many who dream and desire that they are as deeply and completely
mated as this, many more who would fain be so, and some who are.
And from this comes the earnest desire to make marriage sacramental
and the attempt to impose upon all the world the outward appearance,
the restrictions, the pretence at least of such a sacramental union.
There may be such a quasi-sacramental union in many cases, but only
after years can one be sure of it; it is not to be brought about by