There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can
stand between God and man.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
THE IDEA OF A CHURCH
1. THE WORLD DAWN
As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new
religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations
are still uncertain and incomplete. But that is no augury for the
continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.
There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may
be coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night.
It may seem at present as though nothing very much were happening,
except for the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology
have become a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of
points. But nothing fades of itself. The deep stillness of the
late night is broken by a stirring, and the morning star of
creedless faith, the last and brightest of the stars, the star that
owes its light to the coming sun is in the sky.
There is a stirring and a movement. There is a stir, like the stir
before a breeze. Men are beginning to speak of religion without the
bluster of the Christian formulae; they have begun to speak of God
without any reference to Omnipresence, Omniscience, Omnipotence.
The Deists and Theists of an older generation, be it noted, never
did that. Their “Supreme Being” repudiated nothing. He was merely
the whittled stump of the Trinity. It is in the last few decades
that the western mind has slipped loose from this absolutist
conception of God that has dominated the intelligence of Christendom
at least, for many centuries. Almost unconsciously the new thought
is taking a course that will lead it far away from the moorings of
Omnipotence. It is like a ship that has slipped its anchors and
drifts, still sleeping, under the pale and vanishing stars, out to
the open sea… .
2. CONVERGENT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS
In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this
renascent faith.
For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief
in an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds
trained under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which
have hitherto been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between
pseudo-Christian religion or denial, but also it opens the way
towards the completest understanding and sympathy and participation
with the kindred movements for release and for an intensification of
the religious life, that are going on outside the sphere of the
Christian tradition and influence altogether. Allusion has already
been made to the sympathetic devotional poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism parallel with and
assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.
It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is
entirely towards otherworldness, to a treatment of this life as an
evil entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing. It is
too easily assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with
renunciation, not merely of self but of being, with the escape from
all effort of any sort into an exalted vacuity. This is indeed
neither the spirit of China nor of Islam nor of the everyday life
of any people in the world. It is not the spirit of the Sikh nor of
these newer developments of Hindu thought. It has never been the
spirit of Japan. To-day less than ever does Asia seem disposed to
give up life and the effort of life. Just as readily as Europeans,
do the Asiatics reach out their arms to that fuller life we can
live, that greater intensity of existence, to which we can attain by
escaping from ourselves. All mankind is seeking God. There is not
a nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged at
this moment by the spirit of God in them towards the discovery of
God. This is not an age of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in
all the world besides.
Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely parallel to that
which ransacks Christianity. Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are
being thrust aside in a similar way. There is much probing into the
spirit and intention of the Founder. The time is almost ripe for a
heart-searching Dialogue of the Dead, “How we settled our religions
for ever and ever,” between, let us say, Eusebius of Caesarea and
one of Nizam-al-Mulk’s tame theologians. They would be drawn
together by the same tribulations; they would be in the closest
sympathy against the temerity of the moderns; they would have a
common courtliness. The Quran is but little read by Europeans; it
is ignorantly supposed to contain many things that it does not
contain; there is much confusion in people’s minds between its text
and the ancient Semitic traditions and usages retained by its
followers; in places it may seem formless and barbaric; but what it
has chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individualised
militant God who claims the rule of the whole world, who favours
neither rank nor race, who would lead men to righteousness. It is
much more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient
blood sacrifice, and its associated sacerdotalism, than
Christianity. The religion that will presently sway mankind can be
reached more easily from that starting-point than from the confused
mysteries of Trinitarian theology. Islam was never saddled with a
creed. With the very name “Islam” (submission to God) there is no
quarrel for those who hold the new faith… .
All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the
old beliefs. There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism,
its Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its “religion without theology,”
its attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to
that living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human
mind almost instinctively insists… .
It is the same God we all seek; he becomes more and more plainly the
same God.
So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and
incidental and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective
to-day, may be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a
great flood of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all
human affairs, sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and
symbols and shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the
last rag of the Serapeum, and turning all men about into one
direction, as the ships and houseboats swing round together in some
great river with the uprush of the tide… .
3. CAN THERE BE A TRUE CHURCH?
Among those who are beginning to realise the differences and
identities of the revived religion that has returned to them,
certain questions of organisation and assembly are being discussed.
Every new religious development is haunted by the precedents of the
religion it replaces, and it was only to be expected that among
those who have recovered their faith there should be a search for
apostles and disciples, an attempt to determine sources and to form
original congregations, especially among people with European
traditions.
These dispositions mark a relapse from understanding. They are
imitative. This time there has been no revelation here or there;
there is no claim to a revelation but simply that God has become
visible. Men have thought and sought until insensibly the fog of
obsolete theology has cleared away. There seems no need therefore
for special teachers or a special propaganda, or any ritual or
observances that will seem to insist upon differences. The
Christian precedent of a church is particularly misleading. The
church with its sacraments and its sacerdotalism is the disease of
Christianity. Save for a few doubtful interpolations there is no
evidence that Christ tolerated either blood sacrifices or the
mysteries of priesthood. All these antique grossnesses were
superadded after his martyrdom. He preached not a cult but a
gospel; he sent out not medicine men but apostles.
No doubt all who believe owe an apostolic service to God. They
become naturally apostolic. As men perceive and realise God, each
will be disposed in his own fashion to call his neighbour’s
attention to what he sees. The necessary elements of religion could
be written on a post card; this book, small as it is, bulks large
not by what it tells positively but because it deals with
misconceptions. We may (little doubt have I that we do) need
special propagandas and organisations to discuss errors and keep
back the jungle of false ideas, to maintain free speech and restrain
the enterprise of the persecutor, but we do not want a church to
keep our faith for us. We want our faith spread, but for that there
is no need for orthodoxies and controlling organisations of
statement. It is for each man to follow his own impulse, and to