My New Republicans

3.11. OF AN ORGANIZED BROTHERHOOD.

The idea of organizing the progressive elements in the social chaos into
a regular developing force is one that has had a great attraction for
me. I have written upon it elsewhere, and I make no apology for
returning to it here and examining it in the light of various
afterthoughts and with fresh suggestions.

I first broached this idea in a book called "Anticipations," wherein I
described a possible development of thought and concerted action which I
called the New Republicanism, and afterwards I redrew the thing rather
more elaborately in my "Modern Utopia." I had been struck by the
apparently chaotic and wasteful character of most contemporary reform
movements, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that those who aimed at
organizing society and replacing chaos and waste by wise arrangements,
might very well begin by producing a more effective organization for
their own efforts. These complexities of good intention made me
impatient, and I sought industriously in my mind for a short cut through
them. In doing so I think I overlooked altogether too much how
heterogeneous all progressive thought and progressive people must be.

In my "Modern Utopia" I turned this idea of an organized brotherhood
about very thoroughly and looked at it from this point and that; I let
it loose as it were, and gave it its fullest development, and so
produced a sort of secular Order of governing men and women. In a spirit
entirely journalistic I called this the Order of the Samurai, for at the
time I wrote there was much interest in Bushido because of the capacity
for hardship and self-sacrifice this chivalrous culture appears to have
developed in the Japanese. These Samurai of mine were a sort of
voluntary nobility who supplied the administrative and organizing forces
that held my Utopian world together. They were the "New Republicans" of
my "Anticipations" and "Mankind in the Making," much developed and
supposed triumphant and ruling the world.

I sought of course to set out these ideas as attractively as possible in
my books, and they have as a matter of fact proved very attractive to a
certain number of people. Quite a number have wanted to go on with them.
Several little organizations of Utopians and Samurai and the like have
sprung up and informed me of themselves, and some survive; and young men
do still at times drop into my world "personally or by letter" declaring
themselves New Republicans.

All this has been very helpful and at times a little embarrassing to me.
It has given me an opportunity of seeing the ideals I flung into the
distance beyond Sirius and among the mountain snows coming home
partially incarnate in girls and young men. It has made me look into
individualized human aspirations, human impatience, human vanity and a
certain human need of fellowship, at close quarters. It has illuminated
subtle and fine traits; it has displayed nobilities, and it has brought
out aspects of human absurdity to which only the pencil of Mr. George
Morrow could do adequate justice. The thing I have had to explain most
generally is that my New Republicans and Samurai are but figures of
suggestion, figures to think over and use in planning disciplines, but
by no means copies to follow. I have had to go over again, as though it
had never been raised before in any previous writings, the difference
between the spirit and the letter.

These responses have on the whole confirmed my main idea that there is a
real need, a need that many people, and especially adolescent people,
feel very strongly, for some sort of constructive brotherhood of a
closer type than mere political association, to co-ordinate and partly
guide their loose chaotic efforts to get hold of life--but they have
also convinced me that no wide and comprehensive organization can supply
that want.

My New Republicans were presented as in many respects harsh and
overbearing people, "a sort of outspoken secret society" for the
organization of the world. They were not so much an ideal order as the
Samurai of the later book, being rather deduced as a possible outcome of
certain forces and tendencies in contemporary life (A.D. 1900) than, as
literary people say, "created." They were to be drawn from among
engineers, doctors, scientific business organizers and the like, and I
found that it is to energetic young men of the more responsible classes
that this particular ideal appeals. Their organization was quite
informal, a common purpose held them together.

Most of the people who have written to me to call themselves New
Republicans are I find also Imperialists and Tariff Reformers, and I
suppose that among the prominent political figures of to-day the nearest
approach to my New Republicans is Lord Milner and the
Socialist-Unionists of his group. It is a type harshly constructive,
inclined to an unscrupulous pose and slipping readily into a
Kiplingesque brutality.

The Samurai on the other hand were more picturesque figures, with a much
more elaborated organization.

I may perhaps recapitulate the points about that Order here.

In the "Modern Utopia" the visitor from earth remarks:--

"These Samurai form the real body of the State. All this time that I
have spent going to and fro in this planet, it has been growing upon me
that this order of men and women, wearing such a uniform as you wear,
and with faces strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is
the Utopian reality; that but for them the whole fabric of these fair
appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at
last, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life of
earth. Tell me about these Samurai, who remind me of Plato's guardians,
who look like Knight Templars, who bear a name that recalls the
swordsmen of Japan. What are they? Are they an hereditary cast, a
specially educated order, an elected class? For, certainly, this world
turns upon them as a door upon its hinges."

His informant explains:--

"Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their
hands; all our head teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges, our
judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a certain limit,
practising medical men, legislators, must be Samurai, and all the
executive committees and so forth, that play so large a part in our
affairs, are drawn by lot exclusively from them. The order is not
hereditary--we know just enough of biology and the uncertainties of
inheritance to know how silly that would be--and it does not require an
early consecration or novitiate or ceremonies and initiations of that
sort. The Samurai are, in fact, volunteers. Any intelligent adult in a
reasonably healthy and efficient state may, at any age after five and
twenty, become one of the Samurai and take a hand in the universal
control."

"Provided he follows the Rule."

"Precisely--provided he follows the Rule."

"I have heard the phrase, 'voluntary nobility.'"

"That was the idea of our Founders. They made a noble and privileged
order--open to the whole world. No one could complain of an unjust
exclusion, for the only thing that could exclude them from the order was
unwillingness or inability to follow the Rule.

"The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, to discipline
the impulses and emotions, to develop a moral habit and sustain a man in
periods of stress, fatigue and temptation, to produce the maximum
co-operation of all men of good-intent, and in fact to keep all the
Samurai in a state of moral and bodily health and efficiency. It does as
much of this as well as it can, but of course, like all general
propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision. AT
FIRST IN THE MILITANT DAYS, IT WAS A TRIFLE HARD AND UNCOMPROMISING; IT
HAD RATHER TOO STRONG AN APPEAL TO THE MORAL PRIG AND THE HARSHLY
RIGHTEOUS MAN, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and
expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted to the need
of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow. We have now a
whole literature with many very fine things in it, written about the
Rule.

"The Rule consists of three parts; there is the list of things that
qualify, the list of things that must not be done, and the list of
things that must be done. Qualification exacts a little exertion as
evidence of good faith and it is designed to weed out the duller dull
and many of the base."

He goes on to tell of certain intellectual qualifications and
disciplines.

"Next to the intellectual qualification comes the physical, the man must
be in sound health, free from certain foul, avoidable and demoralizing
diseases, and in good training. We reject men who are fat, or thin, or
flabby, or whose nerves are shaky--we refer them back to training. And
finally the man or woman must be fully adult."

"Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!"

"The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five or over; then the
minimum became twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women. Now there
is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want to take advantage
of mere boy and girl emotions--men of my way of thinking, at any rate,
don't--we want to get our Samurai with experiences, with settled mature
conviction. Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly pushing back old age and
death, and keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and more. There's no
need to hurry the young. Let them have a chance of wine, love and song;
let them feel the bite of full-blooded desire, and know what devils they
have to reckon with...

"We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do no great harm, but we
think it well to forbid them none the less, so that we can weed out the
self-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to little seductions
is good for a man's quality. At any rate, it shows that a man is
prepared to pay something for his honour and privileges. We prescribe a
regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any alcoholic drink, all
narcotic drugs...

"Originally the Samurai were forbidden usury, that is to say, the
lending of money at fixed rates of interest. They are still under that
interdiction, but since our commercial code practically prevents usury
altogether, and our law will not recognize contracts for interest upon
private accommodation loans to unprosperous borrowers," (he is speaking
of Utopia), "it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a man growing
richer by mere inaction and at the expense of an impoverished debtor is
profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State insists pretty
effectually now upon the participation of the lender in the borrower's
risks. This, however, is only one part of a series of limitations of the
same character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again
brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance
profits and falsify values, and so the Samurai are forbidden to buy or
sell on their own account or for any employer save the State, unless by
some process of manufacture they change the nature of the commodity (a
mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and they are forbidden
salesmanship and all its arts. Nor may the Samurai do personal services,
except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers,
for example, nor inn waiters nor boot cleaners, men do such services for
themselves. Nor may a man under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged
to do whatever he is told. He may neither be a servant nor keep one; he
must shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own food from the
helper's place, redd his sleeping room and leave it clean..."

Finally came the things they had to do. Their Rule contained:--

"many precise directions regarding his health, and rules that would aim
at once at health and that constant exercise or will that makes life
good. Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the Samurai must
bathe in cold water and the men shave every day; they have the precisest
directions in such matters; the body must be in health, the skin and
nerves and muscles in perfect tone, or the Samurai must go to the
doctors of the order and give implicit obedience to the regimen
prescribed. They must sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they
must eat with and talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their
conversation for an hour at least, at the nearest club-house of the
Samurai, once on three chosen days in every week. Moreover they must
read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for at least five minutes every
day. Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one
book that has been published during the past five years, and the only
intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of a
certain minimum of length for the monthly book or books. But the full
rule in these minor compulsory matters is voluminous and detailed, and
it abounds with alternatives. Its aim is rather to keep before the
Samurai by a number of simple duties, as it were, the need of and some
of the chief methods towards health of body and mind rather than to
provide a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a
community of feeling and interests among the Samurai through habit,
intercourse and a living contemporary literature. These minor
obligations do not earmark more than an hour in the day. Yet they serve
to break down isolations of sympathy, all sorts of physical and
intellectual sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccupations
of many sorts...

"So far as the Samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the State
and the order and discipline of the world, so far, by their discipline
and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together.
But the ultimate fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies
in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this the most striking of
all the rules of the Samurai aims. For seven consecutive days of the
year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of
all the life of men into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no
man or woman and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must go
bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper or money. Provision must
be taken for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack--for they
must sleep under the open sky--but no means of making a fire. They may
study maps before to guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers in
the journey, but they may not carry such helps. They must not go by
beaten ways or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare,
quiet places of the globe--the regions set apart for them.

"This discipline was invented to secure a certain stoutness of heart and
body in the Samurai. Otherwise the order might have lain open to too
many timorous, merely abstemious men and women. Many things had been
suggested, sword-play and tests that verged on torture, climbing in
giddy places and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to
ensure good training and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly also,
it is to draw the minds of the Samurai for a space from the insistent
details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to
work, from personal quarrels and personal affections and the things of
the heated room. Out they must go, clean out of the world..."

These passages will at least serve to present the Samurai idea and the
idea of common Rule of conduct it embodied.

In the "Modern Utopia" I discuss also a lesser Rule and the modification
of the Rule for women and the relation to the order of what I call the
poietic types, those types whose business in life seems to be rather to
experience and express than to act and effectually do. For those things
I must refer the reader to the book itself. Together with a sentence I
have put in italics above, they serve to show that even when I was
devising these Samurai I was not unmindful of the defects that are
essential to such a scheme.

This dream of the Samurai proved attractive to a much more various group
of readers than the New Republican suggestion, and there have been
actual attempts to realise the way of life proposed. In most of these
cases there was manifest a disposition greatly to over-accentuate
organization, to make too much of the disciplinary side of the Rule and
to forget the entire subordination of such things to active thought and
constructive effort. They are valuable and indeed only justifiable as a
means to an end. These attempts of a number of people of very
miscellaneous origins and social traditions to come together and work
like one machine made the essential wastefulness of any terrestrial
realization of my Samurai very clear. The only reason for such an Order
is the economy and development of force, and under existing conditions
disciplines would consume more force than they would engender. The
Order, so far from being a power, would be an isolation. Manifestly the
elements of organization and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia; in
this matter I was nearer the truth in the case of my New Republicans.
These, in contrast with the Samurai, had no formal general organization,
they worked for a common end, because their minds and the suggestion of
their circumstances pointed them to a common end. Nothing was enforced
upon them in the way of observance or discipline. They were not
shepherded and trained together, they came together. It was assumed that
if they wanted strongly they would see to it that they lived in the
manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am taking
it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right. It was not
even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their
constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and
proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of
subtle and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting
and antipathetic. My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for
example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground that
the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would
inevitably vitiate its working. All its disciplines would tend to give
its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and
rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been
developing in this book will see the value of these comments and
recognize with me that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one
more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and
balanced living. They may be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as
an ideal of organization. They are never to be put, as people say, upon
a business footing and made available as a refuge from the individual
problem.

To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent
but he must not bank it with an organization. Each Believer must decide
for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he
needs a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter
and adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life. There is no
reason why one should not, and there is every reason why one should,
discuss one's personal needs and habits and disciplines and elaborate
one's way of life with those about one, and form perhaps with those of
like training and congenial temperament small groups for mutual support.
That sort of association I have already discussed in the previous
section. With adolescent people in particular such association is in
many cases an almost instinctive necessity. There is no reason moreover
why everyone who is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and
contrive a grouping with them. All mutual lovers for example are Orders
of a limited membership, many married couples and endless cliques and
sets are that. Such small and natural associations are indeed
force-giving Orders because they are brought together by a common innate
disposition out of a possibility of mutual assistance and inspiration;
they observe a Rule that springs up and not a Rule imposed. The more of
such groups and Orders we have the better. I do not see why having
formed themselves they should not define and organize themselves. I
believe there is a phase somewhere between fifteen and thirty, in the
life of nearly everybody, when such a group is sought, is needed and
would be helpful in self-development and self-discovery. In leagues and
societies for specific ends, too, we must all participate. But the order
of the Samurai as a great progressive force controlling a multitude of
lives right down to their intimate details and through all the phases of
personal development is a thing unrealizable. To seek to realize it is
impatience. True brotherhood is universal brotherhood. The way to that
is long and toilsome, but it is a way that permits of no such energetic
short cuts as this militant order of my dream would achieve.

3.12. CONCERNING NEW STARTS AND NEW RELIGIONS.

When one is discussing this possible formation of cults and
brotherhoods, it may be well to consider a few of the conditions that
rule such human re-groupings. We live in the world as it is and not in
the world as we want it to be, that is the practical rule by which we
steer, and in directing our lives we must constantly consider the forces
and practicabilities of the social medium in which we move.

In contemporary life the existing ties are so various and so imperative
that the detachment necessary as a preliminary condition to such new
groupings is rarely found. This is not a period in which large numbers
of people break away easily and completely from old connexions. Things
change less catastrophically than once they did. More particularly is
there less driving out into the wilderness. There is less heresy
hunting; persecution is frequently reluctant and can be evaded by slight
concessions. The world as a whole is less harsh and emphatic than it
was. Customs and customary attitudes change nowadays not so much by
open, defiant and revolutionary breaches as by the attrition of partial
negligences and new glosses. Innovating people do conform to current
usage, albeit they conform unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a
constant breaking down and building up of usage, and as a consequence a
lessened need of wholesale substitutions. Human methods have become
viviparous; the New nowadays lives for a time in the form of the Old.
The friend I quote in Chapter 2.10 writes of a possible sect with a
"religious edifice" and ritual of its own, a new religious edifice and a
new ritual. In practice I doubt whether "real" people, people who
matter, people who are getting things done and who have already
developed complex associations, can afford the extensive re-adjustment
implied in such a new grouping. It would mean too much loss of time, too
much loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice of existing
co-operations.

New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting upon
their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful
wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where
movement is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae
unyielding and unadaptable because they are unthinking. In England, for
example, in the last century, where social conditions have been
comparatively stable, discussion good and abundant and internal
migration small, there have been far fewer such developments than in the
United States of America. In England toleration has become an
institution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop and Infidel, can all
meet at the same dinner-table and spend an agreeable week-end together,
there is no need for defensive segregations. In such an atmosphere
opinion and usage change and change continually, not dramatically as the
results of separations and pitched battles but continuously and fluently
as the outcome of innumerable personal reactions. America, on the other
hand, because of its material preoccupations, because of the dispersal
of its thinking classes over great areas, because of the cruder
understanding of its more heterogeneous population (which constantly
renders hard and explicit statement necessary), MEANS its creeds much
more literally and is at once more experimental and less compromising
and tolerant. It is there if anywhere that new brotherhoods and new
creeds will continue to appear. But even in America I think the trend of
things is away from separations and segregations and new starts, and
towards more comprehensive and graduated methods of development.

New religions, I think, appear and are possible and necessary in phases
of social disorganization, in phases when considerable numbers of people
are detached from old systems of direction and unsettled and distressed.
So, at any rate, it was Christianity appeared, in a strained and
disturbed community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental thought, and for
a long time it was confined to the drifting population of seaports and
great cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching the most
settled and most adjusted class, the pagani, last of all and in its most
adaptable forms. It was the greatest new beginning in the world's
history, and the wealth of political and literary and social and
artistic traditions it abandoned had subsequently to be revived and
assimilated to it fragment by fragment from the past it had submerged.
Now, I do not see that the world to-day presents any fair parallelism to
that sere age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity played the
part of a flux. Ours is on the whole an organizing and synthetic rather
than a disintegrating phase throughout the world. Old institutions are
neither hard nor obstinate to-day, and the immense and various
constructive forces at work are saturated now with the conception of
evolution, of secular progressive development, as opposed to the
revolutionary idea. Only a very vast and terrible war explosion can, I
think, change this state of affairs.

This conveys in general terms, at least, my interpretation of the
present time, and it is in accordance with this view that the world is
moving forward as a whole and with much dispersed and discrepant
rightness, that I do not want to go apart from the world as a whole into
any smaller community, with all the implication of an exclusive
possession of right which such a going apart involves. Put to the test
by my own Samurai for example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic
discipline, I found I did not in the least want to be one of that
organization, that it only expressed one side of a much more complex
self than its disciplines permitted. And still less do I want to hamper
the play of my thoughts and motives by going apart into the
particularism of a new religion. Such refuges are well enough when the
times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about the present age, so far
as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to
overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of
thinking instead of assimilating mine.

3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a
person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions
generally. I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted
beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a
different one altogether. Not to realize that, to confuse a church with
its creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and
life-wasting errors.

Now my rules of conduct are based on the supposition that moral
decisions are to be determined by the belief that the individual life
guided by its perception of beauty is incidental, experimental, and
contributory to the undying life of the blood and race. I have decided
for myself that the general business of life is the development of a
collective consciousness and will and purpose out of a chaos of
individual consciousnesses and wills and purposes, and that the way to
that is through the development of the Socialist State, through the
socialization of existing State organizations and their merger of
pacific association in a World State. But so far I have not taken up the
collateral aspect of the synthesis of human consciousness, the
development of collective feeling and willing and expression in the
form, among others, of religious institutions.

Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from
the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated. Customs
are far more enduring things than ideas,--witness the mistletoe at
Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight
of the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious institution is of
much less significance to us than its present effect. The theory of a
religion may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an
irascible Deity or a dozen other things as its end and aim; the
practical fact is that it draws together great multitudes of diverse
individualized people in a common solemnity and self-subordination
however vague, and is so far, like the State, and in a manner far more
intimate and emotional and fundamental than the State, a synthetic
power. And in particular, the idea of the Catholic Church is charged
with synthetic suggestion; it is in many ways an idea broader and finer
than the constructive idea of any existing State. And just as the
Beliefs I have adopted lead me to regard myself as in and of the
existing State, such as it is, and working for its rectification and
development, so I think there is a reasonable case for considering
oneself in and of the Catholic Church and bound to work for its
rectification and development; and this in spite of the fact that one
may not feel justified in calling oneself a Christian in any sense of
the term.

It may be maintained very plausibly that the Catholic Church is
something greater than Christianity, however much the Christians may
have contributed to its making. From the historical point of view it is
a religious and social method that developed with the later development
of the world empire of Rome and as the expression of its moral and
spiritual side. Its head was, and so far as its main body is concerned
still is, the pontifex maximus of the Roman world empire, an official
who was performing sacrifices centuries before Christ was born. It is
easy to assert that the Empire was converted to Christianity and
submitted to its terrestrial leader, the bishop of Rome; it is quite
equally plausible to say that the religious organization of the Empire
adopted Christianity and so made Rome, which had hitherto had no
priority over Jerusalem or Antioch in the Christian Church, the
headquarters of the adopted cult. And if the Christian movement could
take over and assimilate the prestige, the world predominance and
sacrificial conception of the pontifex maximus and go on with that as
part at any rate of the basis of a universal Church, it is manifest that
now in the fulness of time this great organization, after its
accumulation of Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still further
to alter and broaden its teaching and observances and formulae.

In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound to consider ourselves
children of the Catholic Church, albeit critical and innovating children
with a tendency to hark back to our Greek grandparents; we cannot detach
ourselves absolutely from the Church without at the same time detaching
ourselves from the main process of spiritual synthesis that has made us
what we are. And there is a strong case for supposing that not only is
this reasonable for us who live in the tradition of Western Europe, but
that we are legitimately entitled to call upon extra European peoples to
join with us in that attitude of filiation to the Catholic Church since,
outside it, there is no organization whatever aiming at a religious
catholicity and professing or attempting to formulate a collective
religious consciousness in the world. So far as they come to a
conception of a human synthesis they come to it by coming into our
tradition.

I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea. To come from that idea
to the world of present realities is to come to a tangle of
difficulties. Is the Catholic Church merely the Roman communion or does
it include the Greek and Protestant Churches? Some of these bodies are
declaredly dissentient, some claim to be integral portions of the
Catholic Church which have protested against and abandoned certain
errors of the central organization. I admit it becomes a very confusing
riddle in such a country as England to determine which is the Catholic
Church; whether it is the body which possesses and administers
Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to
represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms of
Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking
cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield's Tabernacle in the Tottenham
Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies.
It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in
America among an immense confusion of sectarian fragments.

Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle of
controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as
representing the Church. They assume a mystical Church made up of all
true believers, of all men and women of good intent, whatever their
formulae or connexion. Wherever there is worship, there, they say, is a
fragment of the Church. All and none of these bodies are the true
Church.

This is no doubt profoundly true. It gives something like a working
assumption for the needs of the present time. People can get along upon
that. But it does not exhaust the question. We seek a real and
understanding synthesis. We want a real collectivism, not a poetical
idea; a means whereby men and women of all sorts, all kinds of humanity,
may pray together, sing together, stand side by side, feel the same wave
of emotion, develop a collective being. Doubtless right-spirited men are
praying now at a thousand discrepant altars. But for the most part those
who pray imagine those others who do not pray beside them are in error,
they do not know their common brotherhood and salvation. Their
brotherhood is masked by unanalyzable differences; theirs is a dispersed
collectivism; their churches are only a little more extensive than their
individualities and intenser in their collective separations.

The true Church towards which my own thoughts tend will be the conscious
illuminated expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I think,
develop out of the existing medley of Church fragments and out of all
that is worthy in our poetry and literature, just as the worldwide
Socialist State at which I aim must develop out of such state and casual
economic organizations and constructive movements as exist to-day. There
is no "beginning again" in these things. In neither case will going
apart out of existing organizations secure our ends. Out of what is, we
have to develop what has to be. To work for the Reformation of the
Catholic Church is an integral part of the duty of a believer.

It is curious how misleading a word can be. We speak of a certain phase
in the history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that word
effectually conceals from most people the simple indisputable fact that
there has been no Reformation. There was an attempt at a Reformation in
the Catholic Church, and through a variety of causes it failed. It
detached great masses from the Catholic Church and left that
organization impoverished intellectually and spiritually, but it
achieved no reconstruction at all. It achieved no reconstruction because
the movement as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one fundamentally
necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity. It fell into particularism and
failed. It set up a vast process of fragmentation among Christian
associations. It drove huge fissures through the once common platform.
In innumerable cases they were fissures of organization and prejudice
rather than real differences in belief and mental habit. Sometimes it
was manifestly conflicting material interests that made the split.
People are now divided by forgotten points of difference, by sides taken
by their predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by mere
sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting places. In the present
time, as a result of the dissenting method, there are multitudes of
believing men scattered quite solitarily through the world.

The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the Catholic Church lies still
before us. It is a necessary work. It is a work strictly parallel to the
reformation and expansion of the organized State. Together, these
processes constitute the general duty before mankind.

3.14. OF SECESSION.

The whole trend of my thought in matters of conduct is against whatever
accentuates one's individual separation from the collective
consciousness. It follows naturally from my fundamental creed that
avoidable silences and secrecy are sins, just as abstinences are in
themselves sins rather than virtues. And so I think that to leave any
organization or human association except for a wider and larger
association, to detach oneself in order to go alone, or to go apart
narrowly with just a few, is fragmentation and sin. Even if one
disagrees with the professions or formulae or usages of an association,
one should be sure that the disagreement is sufficiently profound to
justify one's secession, and in any case of doubt, one should remain. I
count schism a graver sin than heresy.

No profession of faith, no formula, no usage can be perfect. It is only
required that it should be possible. More particularly does this apply
to churches and religious organizations. There never was a creed nor a
religious declaration but admitted of a wide variety of interpretations
and implied both more and less than it expressed. The pedantically
conscientious man, in his search for an unblemished religious
brotherhood, has tended always to a solitude of universal dissent.

In the religious as in the economic sphere one must not look for perfect
conditions. Setting up for oneself in a new sect is like founding
Utopias in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential question; our real
business is to take what we have, live in and by it, use it and do our
best to better such faults as are manifest to us, in the direction of a
wider and nobler organization. If you do not agree with the church in
which you find yourself, your best course is to become a reformer IN
that church, to declare it a detached forgetful part of the greater
church that ought to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened
part of the World State. You take it at what it is and try and broaden
it towards reunion. It is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable
that it is right to secede.

This is particularly true of state churches such as is the Church of
England. These are bodies constituted by the national law and amenable
to the collective will. I do not think a man should consider himself
excluded from them because they have articles of religion to which he
cannot subscribe and creeds he will not say. A national state church has
no right to be thus limited and exclusive. Rather then let any man, just
to the very limit that is possible for his intellectual or moral
temperament, remain in his church to redress the balance and do his
utmost to change and broaden it.

But perhaps the Church will not endure a broad-minded man in its body,
speaking and reforming, and will expel him?

Be expelled--well and good! That is altogether different. Let them expel
you, struggling valiantly and resolved to return so soon as they release
you, to hammer at the door. But withdrawing--sulking--going off in a
serene huff to live by yourself spiritually and materially in your own
way--that is voluntary damnation, the denial of the Brotherhood of Man.
Be a rebel or a revolutionary to your heart's content, but a mere
seceder never.

For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have to pay for each step of
moral and intellectual progress with a fresh start, with a conflict
between the new organization and the old from which it sprang, a
perpetually-recurring parricide. There will be a series of religious
institutions in developing order, each containing the remnant too dull
or too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress that began the new
body. Something of the sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic and
the English Protestant churches. We have the intellectual and moral
guidance of the people falling more and more into the hands of an
informal Church of morally impassioned leaders, writers, speakers, and
the like, while the beautiful cathedrals in which their predecessors
sheltered fall more and more into the hands of an uninspiring,
retrogressive but conforming clergy.

Now this was all very well for the Individualist Liberal of the Early
Victorian period, but Individualist Liberalism was a mere destructive
phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic order, a clearing up
of the site. We Socialists want a Church through which we can feel and
think collectively, as much as we want a State that we can serve and be
served by. Whether as members or external critics we have to do our best
to get rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers, so that the
churches may merge again in a universal Church, and that Church
comprehend again the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life of the
race.

I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly clear here. By conformity I
do not mean silent conformity. It is a man's primary duty to convey his
individual difference to the minds of his fellow men. It is because I
want that difference to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should not
leave the assembly. But in particular instances he may find it more
striking and significant to stand out and speak as a man detached from
the general persuasion, just as obstructed and embarrassed ministers of
State can best serve their country at times by resigning office and
appealing to the public judgment by this striking and significant act.

3.15. A DILEMMA.

We are led by this discussion of secession straight between the horns of
a moral dilemma. We have come to two conclusions; to secede is a grave
sin, but to lie is also a grave sin.

But often the practical alternative is between futile secession or
implicit or actual falsehood. It has been the instinct of the aggressive
controversialist in all ages to seize upon collective organizations and
fence them about with oaths and declarations of such a nature as to bar
out anyone not of his own way of thinking. In a democracy, for example,
to take an extreme caricature of our case, a triumphant majority in
power, before allowing anyone to vote, might impose an oath whereby the
leader of the minority and all his aims were specifically renounced. And
if no country goes so far as that, nearly all countries and all churches
make some such restrictions upon opinion. The United States, that land
of abandoned and receding freedoms, imposes upon everyone who crosses
the Atlantic to its shores a childish ineffectual declaration against
anarchy and polygamy. None of these tests exclude the unhesitating liar,
but they do bar out many proud and honest minded people. They "fix" and
kill things that should be living and fluid; they are offences against
the mind of the race. How is a man then to behave towards these test
oaths and affirmations, towards repeating creeds, signing assent to
articles of religion and the like? Do not these unavoidable barriers to
public service, or religious work, stand on a special footing?

Personally I think they do.

I think that in most cases personal isolation and disuse is the greater
evil. I think if there is no other way to constructive service except
through test oaths and declarations, one must take then. This is a
particular case that stands apart from all other cases. The man who
preaches a sermon and pretends therein to any belief he does not truly
hold is an abominable scoundrel, but I do not think he need trouble his
soul very greatly about the barrier he stepped over to get into the
pulpit, if he felt the call to preach, so long as the preaching be
honest. A Republican who takes the oath of allegiance to the King and
wears his uniform is in a similar case. These things stand apart; they
are so formal as to be scarcely more reprehensible than the falsehood of
calling a correspondent "Dear," or asking a tiresome lady to whom one is
being kind and civil, for the pleasure of dancing with her. We ought to
do what we can to abolish these absurd barriers and petty falsehoods,
but we ought not to commit a social suicide against them.

That is how I think and feel in this matter, but if a man sees the
matter more gravely, if his conscience tells him relentlessly and
uncompromisingly, "this is a lie," then it is a lie and he must not be
guilty of it. But then I think it ill becomes him to be silently
excluded. His work is to clamour against the existence of the barrier
that wastes him.

I do not see that lying is a fundamental sin. In the first place some
lying, that is to say some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement, is
necessary to nearly everything we do, and the truest statement becomes
false if we forget or alter the angle at which it is made, the direction
in which it points. In the next the really fundamental and most
generalized sin is self-isolation. Lying is a sin only because
self-isolation is a sin, because it is an effectual way of cutting
oneself off from human co-operation. That is why there is no sin in
telling a fairy tale to a child. But telling the truth when it will be
misunderstood is no whit better than lying; silences are often blacker
than any lies. I class secrets with lies and cannot comprehend the moral
standards that exonerate secrecy in human affairs.

To all these things one must bring a personal conscience and be prepared
to examine particular cases. The excuses I have made, for example, for a
very broad churchman to stay in the Church might very well be twisted
into an excuse for taking an oath in something one did not to the
slightest extent believe, in order to enter and betray some organization
to which one was violently hostile. I admit that there may be every
gradation between these two things. The individual must examine his
special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility
of co-operation. I do not see how there can be a general rule. I have
already shown why in my own case I hesitate to profess a belief in God,
because, I think, the misleading element in that profession would
outweigh the advantage of sympathy and confidence gained.

3.16. A COMMENT.

The preceding section has been criticized by a friend who writes:--

"In religious matters apparent assent produces false unanimity. There is
no convention about these things; if there were they would not exist. On
the contrary, the only way to get perfunctory tests and so forth
abrogated, is for a sufficient number of people to refuse to take them.
It is in this case as in every other; secession is the beginning of a
new integration. The living elements leave the dead or dying form and
gradually create in virtue of their own combinations a new form more
suited to present things. There is a formative, a creative power in
sincerity and also in segregation itself. And the new form, the new
species produced by variation and segregation will measure itself and
its qualities with the old one. The old one will either go to the wall,
accept the new one and be renewed by it, or the new one will itself be
pushed out of existence if the old one has more vitality and is better
adapted to the circumstances. This process of variation, competition and
selection, also of intermarriage between equally vital and equally
adapted varieties, is after all the process by which not only races
exist but all human thoughts."

So my friend, who I think is altogether too strongly swayed by
biological analogies. But I am thinking not of the assertion of opinions
primarily but of co-operation with an organization with which, save for
the matter of the test, one may agree. Secession may not involve the
development of a new and better moral organization; it may simply mean
the suicide of one's public aspect. There may be no room or no need of a
rival organization. To secede from State employment, for example, is not
to create the beginnings of a new State, however many--short of a
revolution--may secede with you. It is to become a disconnected private
person, and throw up one's social side.

3.17. WAR.

I do not think a discussion of man's social relations can be considered
at all complete or satisfactory until we have gone into the question of
military service. To-day, in an increasing number of countries, military
service is an essential part of citizenship and the prospect of war lies
like a great shadow across the whole bright complex prospect of human
affairs. What should be the attitude of a right-living man towards his
State at war and to warlike preparations?

In no other connexion are the confusions and uncertainty of the
contemporary mind more manifest. It is an odd contradiction that in
Great Britain and Western Europe generally, just those parties that
stand most distinctly for personal devotion to the State in economic
matters, the Socialist and Socialistic parties, are most opposed to the
idea of military service, and just those parties that defend individual
self-seeking and social disloyalty in the sphere of property are most
urgent for conscription. No doubt some of this uncertainty is due to the
mixing in of private interests with public professions, but much more is
it, I think, the result of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient
grasp of the implications of the propositions under discussion. The
ordinary political Socialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose
every sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal peace, the merger
of national partitions in loyalty to the World State. But he does not
recognize that the way to reach that goal is not necessarily by
minimizing and specializing war and war responsibility at the present
time. There he falls short of his own constructive conceptions and
lapses into the secessionist methods of the earlier Radicals. We have
here another case strictly parallel to several we have already
considered. War is a collective concern; to turn one's back upon it, to
refuse to consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those
who are least prepared to deal with it in a broad spirit.

In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces. In many ways
military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the
contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere
advertisement, push, adulteration, under-selling and intermittent
employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane,
into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more
honourable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment
to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They
are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here a man is at
least supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by
self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research
by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by
innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and
rapid development of method and appliances in naval and military
affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil
conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the
progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house
appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty
years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly
heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house
of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory
places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle
or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to
those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a
use now for such superannuated things.

3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION.

What is the meaning of war in life?

War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with
the whole fabric of human life. That violence and killing which between
animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized
in war. It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also a
co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and
development within the war-making group.

War, it seems to me, is really the elimination of violent competition as
between man and man, an excretion of violence from the developing social
group. Through war and military organization, and through war and
military organization only, has it become possible to conceive of peace.

This violence was a necessary phase in human and indeed in all animal
development. Among low types of men and animals it seems an inevitable
condition of the vigour of the species and the beauty of life. The more
vital and various individual must lead and prevail, leave progeny and
make the major contribution to the synthesis of the race; the weaker
individual must take a subservient place and leave no offspring. That
means in practice that the former must directly or indirectly kill the
latter until some mitigated but equally effectual substitute for that
killing is invented. That duel disappears from life, the fight of the
beasts for food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only by virtue
of its replacement by new forms of competition. With the development of
primitive war we have such a replacement. The competition becomes a
competition to serve and rule in the group, the stronger take the
leadership and the larger share of life, and the weaker co-operate in
subordination, they waive and compromise the conflict and use their
conjoint strength against a common rival.

Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not know
if so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these
confessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human
synthesis I have not sufficiently insisted upon the part played by
competition in that synthesis. But the implications of the view that I
have set forth are fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is an
experiment for the synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my
system of conduct so far as it is a system is built. Manifestly the
individual's function is either self-development, service and
reproduction, or failure and an end.

With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and
participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and
passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for
life has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of
competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition
that is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful,
I desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and
devoted, men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making
their utmost contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end
content to abide by a verdict.

The whole development of civilization, it seems to me, consists in the
development of adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual and
moral atmosphere about those tests so that they shall be neither cruel
nor wasteful. If the test is not to be 'are you strong enough to kill
everyone you do not like?' that will only be because it will ask still
more comprehensively and with regard to a multitude of qualities other
than brute killing power, 'are you adding worthily to the synthesis by
existence and survival?'

I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual need of competition. I
admit that upon that turns the practicability of all the great series of
organizing schemes that are called Socialism. The Socialist scheme must
show a system in which predominance and reproduction are correlated with
the quality and amount of an individual's social contribution, and so
far I acknowledge it is only in the most general terms that this can be
claimed as done. We Socialists have to work out all these questions far
more thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We owe that to our movement
and the world.

It is no adequate answer to our antagonists to say, indeed it is a mere
tu quoque to say, that the existing system does not present such a
correlation, that it puts a premium on secretiveness and self-seeking
and a discount on many most necessary forms of social service. That is a
mere temporary argument for a delay in judgment.

The whole history of humanity seems to me to present a spectacle of this
organizing specialization of competition, this replacement of the
indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for life by an organized
and collectively intelligent development of life. We see a secular
replacement of brute conflict by the law, a secular replacement of
indiscriminate brute lust by marriage and sexual taboos, and now with
the development of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady replacement
of blind industrial competition by public economic organization. And
moreover there is going on a great educational process bringing a
greater and greater proportion of the minds of the community into
relations of understanding and interchange.

Just as this process of organization proceeds, the violent and chaotic
conflict of individuals and presently of groups of individuals
disappears, personal violence, private war, cut-throat competition,
local war, each in turn is replaced by a more efficient and more
economical method of survival, a method of survival giving constantly
and selecting always more accurately a finer type of survivor.

I might compare the social synthesis to crystals growing out of a fluid
matrix. It is where the growing order of the crystals has as yet not
spread that the old resource to destruction and violent personal or
associated acts remains.

But this metaphor of crystals is a very inadequate one, because crystals
have no will in themselves; nor do crystals, having failed to grow in
some particular form, presently modify that form more or less and try
again. I see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which
are indeed paid mercenaries from the region of violence, but legislation
and literature, teaching and tradition, organized religion, getting
themselves and the social structure together, year after year and age
after age, halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. And it
seems to me that the amount of lawlessness and crime, the amount of
waste and futility, the amount of war and war possibility and war danger
in the world are just the measure of the present inadequacy of the
world's system of collective organization to the purpose before them.

It follows from this very directly that only one thing can end war on
the earth and that is a subtle mental development, an idea, the
development of the idea of the world commonweal in the collective mind.
The only real method of abolishing war is to perceive it, to realize it,
to express it, to think it out and think about it, to make all the world
understand its significance, and to clear and preserve its significant
functions. In human affairs to understand an evil is to abolish it; it
is the only way to abolish any evil that arises out of the untutored
nature of man. Which brings me back here again to my already repeated
persuasion, that in expressing things, rendering things to each other,
discussing our differences, clearing up the metaphysical conceptions
upon which differences are discussed, and in a phrase evolving the
collective mind, lies not only the cures of war and poverty but the
general form of all a man's duty and the essential work of mankind.

3.19. MODERN WAR.

In our contemporary world, in our particular phase, military and naval
organization loom up, colossal and unprecedent facts. They have the
effect of an overhanging disaster that grows every year more tremendous,
every year in more sinister contrast with the increasing securities and
tolerations of the everyday life. It is impossible to imagine now what a
great war in Europe would be like; the change in material and method has
been so profound since the last cycle of wars ended with the downfall of
the Third Napoleon. But there can be little or no doubt that it would
involve a destruction of property and industrial and social
disorganization of the most monstrous dimensions. No man, I think, can
mark the limits of the destruction of a great European conflict were it
to occur at the present time; and the near advent of practicable flying
machines opens a whole new world of frightful possibilities.

For my own part I can imagine that a collision between such powers as
Great Britain, Germany or America, might very well involve nearly every
other power in the world, might shatter the whole fabric of credit upon
which our present system of economics rests and put back the orderly
progress of social construction for a vast interval of time. One figures
great towns red with destruction while giant airships darken the sky,
one pictures the crash of mighty ironclads, the bursting of tremendous
shells fired from beyond the range of sight into unprotected cities. One
thinks of congested ways swarming with desperate fighters, of torrents
of fugitives and of battles gone out of the control of their generals
into unappeasable slaughter. There is a vision of interrupted
communications, of wrecked food trains and sunken food ships, of vast
masses of people thrown out of employment and darkly tumultuous in the
streets, of famine and famine-driven rioters. What modern population
will stand a famine? For the first time in the history of warfare the
rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure,
assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and
unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these
new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of
adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no
effectual guarantee that it could not occur.

But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good
than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the
last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is
lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be
brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public
education and to a thousand interferences with their private
self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men
could be brought to consent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread
of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in an age of chaotic
industrial production in order that men may be brought to subserve the
growth of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too high for them to
understand. Men must be forced to care for fleets and armies until they
have learnt to value cities and self development and a beautiful social
life.

The real danger of modern war lies not in the disciplined power of the
fighting machine but in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind
that may set that machine in motion. It is not that our guns and ships
are marvellously good, but that our press and political organizations
are haphazard growths entirely inferior to them. If this present phase
of civilization should end in a debacle, if presently humanity finds
itself beginning again at a lower level of organization, it will not be
because we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but
because we have failed to develop adequate powers of control for them
and collective determination. This panoply of war waits as the test of
our progress towards the realization of that collective mind which I
hold must ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being. It is
here to measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those
defects to refer us back to our studies.

Just as we understand does war become needless.

But I do not think that war and military organization will so much
disappear as change its nature as the years advance. I think that the
phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one
through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something
that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the
conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and
devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal
responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last
ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that
welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.

3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES.

From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate
things, to one's self control, the regulation of one's personal life.
And first about abstinences and disciplines.

I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that
dislikes abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.

I do not feel that it is right to suppress altogether any part of one's
being. In itself abstinence seems to me a refusal to experience, and
that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is to say that abstinence for
its own sake is evil. But for an end all abstinences are permissible,
and if the kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his
associated efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is
convinced that he must specialize because of the discursiveness of his
motives, because there is something he wants to do or be so good that
the rest of them may very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must
suppress. But the virtue is in what he gets done and not in what he does
not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason for abstinence, as when a man
has a passion like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest
indulgence will arouse. Then he must needs adopt heroic abstinence, and
even more so must he take to preventive restraint if he sees any motive
becoming unruly and urgent and troublesome. Fear is a sound reason for
abstinence and so is love. Many who have sensitive imaginations nowadays
very properly abstain from meat because of butchery. And it is often
needful, out of love and brotherhood, to abstain from things harmless to
oneself because they are inconveniently alluring to others linked to us.
The moderate drinker who sits at table sipping his wine in the sight of
one he knows to be a potential dipsomaniac is at best an unloving fool.

But mere abstinence and the doing of barren toilsome unrewarding things
for the sake of the toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There is
neither honour nor virtue nor good in that.

I do not believe in negative virtues. I think the ideas of them arise
out of the system of metaphysical errors I have roughly analyzed in my
first Book, out of the inherent tendency of the mind to make the
relative absolute and to convert quantitative into qualitative
differences. Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such
unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay,
absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact
is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is
dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a
tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts. It was
blindness to that which set men stoning the woman taken in adultery.
They forgot what they were made of. This stupidity, this unreasonable
idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and
exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born
impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang
from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but
introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions
and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions,
gather such constructive experience, as we may.

There is a mass of real superstition upon these points, a belief in a
magic purity, in magic personalities who can say:--

My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure,

and wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the young man in Mr. Kipling's
"Finest Story in the World."

There is a lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead the
normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are
exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made.
But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and
plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and can
draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has
physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological
classifications and moral generalities. It is not true that his
absorbent vessels begin their task as children begin the guessing game,
by asking, "Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?" He responds to
stimulation and recuperates after the exhaustion of his response, and
his being is singularly careless whether the stimulation comes as a drug
or stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals.

Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of that admirable firm of
soap-boilers which assures its customers that the soap they make
"contains no chemicals." Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical
class of substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with all
other things. So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their
children with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken
helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who
denies healing only to those who have studied pathology, and declares
that anything whatever put into a bottle and labelled with directions
for its use by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned. But indeed all
drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there
is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness
in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless
artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are
matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is
stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely
to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become
painful to check or control. The moral rule of my standards is
irregularity. If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue
of sins by asking: "are you a man of regular life?" And I would charge
my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving
irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork
and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and
sinners. Right conduct for the common unspecialized man lies delicately
adjusted between defect and excess as a watch is adjusted and adjustable
between fast and slow. We none of us altogether and always keep the
balance or are altogether safe from losing it. We swing, balancing and
adjusting, along our path. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most
part a mere evasion of life.

3.21. ON FORGETTING, AND THE NEED OF PRAYER, READING, DISCUSSION AND WORSHIP.

One aspect of life I had very much in mind when I planned those Samurai
disciplines of mine. It was forgetting.

We forget.

Even after we have found Salvation, we have to keep hold of Salvation;
believing, we must continue to believe. We cannot always be at a high
level of noble emotion. We have clambered on the ship of Faith and found
our place and work aboard, and even while we are busied upon it, behold
we are back and drowning in the sea of chaotic things.

Every religious body, every religious teacher, has appreciated this
difficulty and the need there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs
restatement and revival as the body needs food. And since the Believer
is to seek much experience and be a judge of less or more in many
things, it is particularly necessary that he should keep hold upon a
living Faith.

How may he best do this?

I think we may state it as a general duty that he must do whatever he
can to keep his faith constantly alive. But beyond that, what a man must
do depends almost entirely upon his own intellectual character. Many
people of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves by some
recurrent duty, by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or
re-reading some devotional book. With others constant repetition leads
to a mental and spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become
unmeaning, eloquent statements inane and ridiculous,--matter for parody.
All who can, I think, should pray and should read and re-read what they
have found spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred
dispositions and can organize these exercises, they should do so.
Collective worship again is a necessity for many Believers. For many,
the public religious services of this or that form of Christianity
supply an atmosphere rich in the essential quality of religion and
abounding in phrases about the religious life, mellow from the use of
centuries and almost immediately applicable. It seems to me that if one
can do so, one should participate in such public worship and habituate
oneself to read back into it that collective purpose and conscience it
once embodied.

Very much is to be said for the ceremony of Holy Communion or the Mass,
for those whom accident or scruples do not debar. I do not think your
modern liberal thinkers quite appreciate the finer aspects of this, the
one universal service of the Christian Church. Some of them are set
forth very finely by a man who has been something of a martyr for
conscience' sake, and is for me a hero as well as a friend, in a world
not rich in heroes, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his book, "The Meaning
of the Mass."

With others again, Faith can be most animated by writing, by confession,
by discussion, by talk with friends or antagonists.

One or other or all of these things the Believer must do, for the mind
is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is
presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of
King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon
it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your
soul, directing it back to anarchy.

For many types that, however, is exactly what happens with public
worship. They DO get a King Log in ceremony. And if you deliberately
overcome and suppress your perception of and repugnance to the
perfunctoriness of religion in nine-tenths of the worshippers about you,
you may be destroying at the same time your own intellectual and moral
sensitiveness. But I am not suggesting that you should force yourself to
take part in public worship against your perceptions, but only that if
it helps you to worship you should not hesitate to do so.

We deal here with a real need that is not to be fettered by any general
prescription. I have one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so uplifting
in the world as the atmosphere of the afternoon service in the choir of
King's College Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished and
theologically sceptical woman, who accustomed herself for some time to
hear from a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral
and who would go great distances to do that.

Many people find an exaltation and broadening of the mind in mountain
scenery and the starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea; and as I
have already said, it was part of the disciplines of these Samurai of
mine that yearly they should go apart for at least a week of solitary
wandering and meditation in lonely and desolate places. Music again is a
frequent means of release from the narrow life as it closes about us.
One man I know makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any
passage that stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. Others
again seem able to refresh their nobility of outlook in the atmosphere
of an intense personal love.

Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were an essential part of
ourselves. Such a man as myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,
versatile, sensuous, curious, and a little greedy for experience, is
perpetually losing touch with his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn
over these pages that I have written and come upon my declarations and
confessions with a sense of alien surprise.

It may be, I say, that for some of us forgetting is the normal process,
that one has to believe and forget and blunder and learn something and
regret and suffer and so come again to belief much as we have to eat and
grow hungry and eat again. What these others can get in their temples
we, after our own manner, must distil through sleepless and lonely
nights, from unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of bruised
shins.