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Page 10
VI
One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no
religion here!"
"I know what you mean," he said. "I think it is one of the things that
one wonders at most, to remember into how very small and narrow a thing
religion was made, and how much that was religious was never supposed to
be so."
"Yes," I said, "as I think of it now, it seems to have been a game
played by a few players, a game with a great many rules."
"Yes," he said, "it was a game often enough; but of course the mischief
of it was, that when it was most a game it most pretended to be
something else--to contain the secret of life and all knowledge."
"I used to think," I said, "that religion was like a noble and generous
boy with the lyrical heart of a poet, made by some sad chance into a
king, surrounded by obsequious respect and pomp and etiquette, bound by
a hundred ceremonious rules, forbidden to do this and that, taught to
think that his one duty was to be magnificently attired, to acquire
graceful arts of posture and courtesy, subtly and gently prevented from
obeying natural and simple impulses, made powerless--a crowned slave; so
that, instead of being the freest and sincerest thing in the world, it
became the prisoner of respectability and convention, just a part of the
social machine."
"That was only one side of it," said Amroth. "It was often where it was
least supposed to be."
"Yes," I said, "as far as I resent anything now, I resent the conversion
of so much religion from an inspiring force into a repressive force. One
learnt as a child to think of it, not as a great moving flood of energy
and joy, but as an awful power apart from life, rejoicing in petty
restrictions, and mainly concerned with creating an unreal atmosphere of
narrow piety, hostile to natural talk and laughter and freedom. God's
aid was invoked, in childhood, mostly when one was naughty and
disobedient, so that one grew to think of Him as grim, severe,
irritable, anxious to interfere. What wonder that one lost all wish to
meet God and all natural desire to know Him! One thought of Him as
impossible to please except by behaving in a way in which it was not
natural to behave; and one thought of religion as a stern and dreadful
process going on somewhere, like a law-court or a prison, which one had
to keep clear of if one could. Yet I hardly see how, in the interests of
discipline, it could have been avoided. If only one could have begun at
the other end!"
"Yes," said Amroth, "but that is because religion has fallen so much
into the hands of the wrong people, and is grievously misrepresented.
It has too often come to be identified, as you say, with human law, as a
power which leaves one severely alone, if one behaves oneself, and which
punishes harshly and mechanically if one outsteps the limit. It comes
into the world as a great joyful motive; and then it becomes identified
with respectability, and it is sad to think that it is simply from the
fact that it has won the confidence of the world that it gains its awful
power of silencing and oppressing. It becomes hostile to frankness and
independence, and puts a premium on caution and submissiveness; but that
is the misuse of it and the degradation of it; and religion is still the
most pure and beautiful thing in the world for all that; the doctrine
itself is fine and true in a way, if one can view it without impatience;
it upholds the right things; it all makes for peace and order, and even
for humility and just kindliness; it insists, or tries to insist, on the
fact that property and position and material things do not matter, and
that quality and method do matter. Of course it is terribly distorted,
and gets into the hands of the wrong people--the people who want to keep
things as they are. Now the Gospel, as it first came, was a perfectly
beautiful thing--the idea that one must act by tender impulse, that one
must always forgive, and forget, and love; that one must take a natural
joy in the simplest things, find every one and everything interesting
and delightful ... the perfectly natural, just, good-humoured,
uncalculating life--that was the idea of it; and that one was not to be
superior to the hard facts of the world, not to try to put sorrow or
pain out of sight, but to live eagerly and hopefully in them and through
them; not to try to school oneself into hardness or indifference, but to
love lovable things, and not to condemn or despise the unlovable. That
was indeed a message out of the very heart of God. But of course all the
acrid divisions and subdivisions of it come, not from itself, but from
the material part of the world, that determines to traffic with the
beautiful secret, and make it serve its turn. But there are plenty of
true souls within it all, true teachers, faithful learners--and the
world cannot do without it yet, though it is strangely fettered and
bound. Indeed, men can never do without it, because the spiritual force
is there; it is full of poetry and mystery, that ageless brotherhood of
saints and true-hearted disciples; but one has to learn that many that
claim its powers have them not, while many who are outside all
organisations have the secret."
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