[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of
God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar
and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which
all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at
all.
And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in
destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy;
they only destroy political and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam
was not responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove (from their
premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam
should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweater should
not be punished by men. With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make
certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we
shall not have a very jolly or complete one here. With their paralysing hints of all
conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they
only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove. Not only is the
faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly
confusion. The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have
wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven;
but they laid waste the world.
IX Authority and the Adventurer
THE last chapter has been concerned with the contention that orthodoxy is not
only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of morality or order, but is also the only
logical guardian of liberty, innovation and advance. If we wish to pull down the
prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we
can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or
lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes
mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter. If we wish
specially to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot
help it much by insisting on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best
reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and
the flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent. If we wish particularly
to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall
instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we desire European civilization to
be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their
peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall
rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero.
Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear
dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a
club is always in favour of the rich one.
And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes the whole
matter. A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree with me so far, may justly
turn round and say, You have found a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall;
very well. You have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely
asserted in Original Sin; all right. You have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; I
congratulate you. You are convinced that worshippers of a personal God look outwards
and are progressive; I congratulate them. But even supposing that those doctrines do
include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines? Granted
that all modern society is trusting the rich too much because it does not allow for
human weakness; granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because
(believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why cannot you simply
allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall? If you have discovered that
the idea of damnation represents a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take
the idea of danger and leave the idea of damnation? If you see clearly the kernel of
common-sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the
kernel and leave the nut? Why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers
which I, as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using) why cannot you
simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can
comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature
incomprehensible? This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a pleasure
to try to answer it.
The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some
intellectual justification for my intuitions. If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an
intellectual convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd
psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man s exercise of freewill if I believe
that he has got it. But I am in this matter yet more definitely a rationalist. I do not
propose to turn this book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad to
meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more obvious arena. Here I
am only giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty. But I may pause to
remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian
cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that having found the moral atmosphere
of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual
arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense. In case the
argument should be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic I will
here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions on the purely
objective or scientific truth of the matter.
If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can
only answer, For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in
Christianity. I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence But the evidence in my
case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]