of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of
humanitarianism. Sir Harry’s ideas are much less thoroughly thought
out than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have
quoted. On that account they are perhaps more typical. He speaks
as though Christ were simply an eminent but illreported and
abominably served teacher of ethics—and yet of the only right ideal
and ethics. He speaks as though religions were nothing more than
ethical movements, and as though Christianity were merely someone
remarking with a bright impulsiveness that everything was simply
horrid, and so, “Let us instal loving kindness as a cardinal axiom.
He ignores altogether the fundamental essential of religion, which
is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING
MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE
INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD. He presents a
conception of religion relieved of its “nonsense” as the cheerful
self-determination of a number of bright little individuals (much
stirred but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the Service of
Man. As he seems to present it, it is as outward a thing, it goes
as little into the intimacy of their lives, as though they had after
proper consideration agreed to send a subscription to a Red Cross
Ambulance or take part in a public demonstration against the
Armenian Massacres, or do any other rather nice-spirited exterior
thing. This is what he says:
“I hope that the religion of the future will devote itself wholly to
the Service of Man. It can do so without departing from the
Christian ideal and Christian ethics. It need only drop all that is
silly and disputable, and ‘mattering not neither here nor there,’ of
Christian theology—a theology virtually absent from the direct
teaching of Christ—and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions
not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by
the confirmation of science. An excellent remedy for the nonsense
which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter
Monson’s ‘Service of Man,’ which was published as long ago as 1887,
and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in
its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton’s ‘Man and
the Bible.’ Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the
relations between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade’s
‘Martyrdom of Man.’”
Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then
makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help
nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the
“Service of Man” is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an
hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison of the mortal life.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE INVISIBLE KING
1. MODERN RELIGION A POLITICAL RELIGION
The conception of a young and energetic God, an Invisible Prince
growing in strength and wisdom, who calls men and women to his
service and who gives salvation from self and mortality only through
self-abandonment to his service, necessarily involves a demand for a
complete revision and fresh orientation of the life of the convert.
God faces the blackness of the Unknown and the blind joys and
confusions and cruelties of Life, as one who leads mankind through a
dark jungle to a great conquest. He brings mankind not rest but a
sword. It is plain that he can admit no divided control of the
world he claims. He concedes nothing to Caesar. In our philosophy
there are no human things that are God’s and others that are
Caesar’s. Those of the new thought cannot render unto God the
things that are God’s, and to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.
Whatever claim Caesar may make to rule men’s lives and direct their
destinies outside the will of God, is a usurpation. No king nor
Caesar has any right to tax or to service or to tolerance, except he
claim as one who holds for and under God. And he must make good his
claim. The steps of the altar of the God of Youth are no safe place
for the sacrilegious figure of a king. Who claims “divine right”
plays with the lightning.
The new conceptions do not tolerate either kings or aristocracies or
democracies. Its implicit command to all its adherents is to make
plain the way to the world theocracy. Its rule of life is the
discovery and service of the will of God, which dwells in the hearts
of men, and the performance of that will, not only in the private
life of the believer but in the acts and order of the state and
nation of which he is a part. I give myself to God not only because
I am so and so but because I am mankind. I become in a measure
responsible for every evil in the world of men. I become a knight
in God’s service. I become my brother’s keeper. I become a
responsible minister of my King. I take sides against injustice,
disorder, and against all those temporal kings, emperors, princes,
landlords, and owners, who set themselves up against God’s rule and
worship. Kings, owners, and all who claim rule and decisions in the
world’s affairs, must either show themselves clearly the fellow-servants of the believer or become the objects of his steadfast
antagonism.
2. THE WILL OF GOD
It is here that those who explain this modern religiosity will seem
most arbitrary to the inquirer. For they relate of God, as men will
relate of a close friend, his dispositions, his apparent intentions,
the aims of his kingship. And just as they advance no proof
whatever of the existence of God but their realisation of him, so
with regard to these qualities and dispositions they have little
argument but profound conviction. What they say is this; that if
you do not feel God then there is no persuading you of him; we
cannot win over the incredulous. And what they say of his qualities
is this; that if you feel God then you will know, you will realise
more and more clearly, that thus and thus and no other is his method
and intention.
It comes as no great shock to those who have grasped the full
implications of the statement that God is Finite, to hear it
asserted that the first purpose of God is the attainment of clear
knowledge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, and of
knowledge as a means to power. For that he must use human eyes and
hands and brains.
And as God gathers power he uses it to an end that he is only
beginning to apprehend, and that he will apprehend more fully as
time goes on. But it is possible to define the broad outlines of
the attainment he seeks. It is the conquest of death.
It is the conquest of death; first the overcoming of death in the
individual by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an
undying purpose, and then the defeat of that death that seems to
threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun.
God fights against death in every form, against the great death of
the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency,
baseness, misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who
can deliver us “from the body of this death.” This is the battle
that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of
the animal’s round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and
laughing and weeping, fearing and failing, and presently of wearying
and dying, which is the whole life that living without God can give
us. And from these great propositions there follow many very
definite maxims and rules of life for those who serve God. These we
will immediately consider.
3. THE CRUCIFIX
But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind
of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and
the vaguer sort of Christianity. There are a number of people
closely in touch with those who have found the new religion who,
biased probably by a dread of too complete a break with
Christianity, have adopted a theogony which is very reminiscent of
Gnosticism and of the Paulician, Catharist, and kindred sects to
which allusion has already been made. He, who is called in this
book God, they would call God-the-Son or Christ, or the Logos; and
what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled Being, they would
call God-the-Father. And what we speak of here as Life, they would
call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that perish, Man.
And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading our
profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that
Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them
must be ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them. And