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Page 33
"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown
gray with Thy breath."
But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as
in "Atalanta"), I gathered that the world was, if possible,
more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.
The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself
was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it.
The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself
a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did
for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be
the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who,
by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the
accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced
that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder
than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices;
but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat
in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape.
At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian
religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.
Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong
case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something
timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian,"
especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.
The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile.
Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way,
were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there
was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.
The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests
never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation
that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.
I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different,
I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different.
I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned
up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for
fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed,
was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood.
I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never
was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his
anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history;
because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.
The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and
non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached
it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the
fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward
the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.
The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians;
and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic
Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity
which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could
be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it
would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?
In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this
monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape
every instant.
I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves
the one real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the
Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is
a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it
may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people;
it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe.
I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much
drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--
I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of
all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience.
Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them.
The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages
and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find
Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou
shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on
the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would
be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this doctrine
of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense,
and I believe it still--with other things. And I was thoroughly
annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed)
that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light
of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing.
I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church
from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality
had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong
in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we
needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed
in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed
out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,
then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men
had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.
I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was
the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.
But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves
that science and progress were the discovery of one people,
and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult
to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves,
and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative
insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic,
we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering
some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd
religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus,
because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics
of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two
hundred years, but not in two thousand.
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