Chapter II: Religion and the Individual

I HAVE no difficulty in understanding the practical indifference which a bad man shows towards religion. He has made up his mind not to lead a good life, and having done that, he does not care to make pretence of religion. He does not care to add hypocrisy to the list of his misdeeds. But I cannot understand the attitude of a man who poses as a good man and yet practises no religion. He tries to be a good husband, a good father, a good citizen. He prides himself on being upright and honest in his dealings with his fellow-men, but he has no inclination for religion. He does not see the use of it, he gets no benefit out of it. With such men the subjective theory of religion utterly breaks down. You appeal to his spiritual needs, you hint at those mystical yearnings and longings which at certain times surge up from the region of the subconscious. He stares at you with a blank look and says bluntly that he has never felt them. His yearnings and longings are for much more concrete things which he can see and feel. This is certainly one of the causes of that weakening of the religious spirit which all good and thoughtful men deplore in our time. The reason is because they have a false view about religion and they take no interest in it. The question is not whether one feels the need of religion or not, whether it appeals to one, whether one gets any benefit out of it. Religion rests on a great central fact. God exists, He is our Creator and our Lord, He is our first Beginning and last End. If we are rational creatures and wish to be good men, we must recognise those tremendous facts. What should we think of a son who prided himself on being a just and honest man, a straightforward man, and a kindly neighbour, but entirely neglected his poor old parents? He never assisted them, never went to see them, never even wrote to them. He ignored them and desired to have nothing to do with them. Such a one has obviously forgotten that a good man does not pick and choose what suits him in the moral life. A good moral life is a complex thing and comprises many duties. We may not neglect any, but above all we must not neglect the most important of all. As our relation to our parents demands that we should honour them with reverence, obedience, and love, so our relation with God our Creator demands that we should recognise our indebtedness to Him and honour Him with reverence, obedience, and love. That is the first and the greatest commandment. Nobody who neglects that can lay claim to doing his duty as a good and honest man. He fails in the most important duty of all, in what constitutes the very kernel and essence of a good life. It is no answer for an irreligious man to say that he never got any benefit out of religion. If religion is practised rightly it confers innumerable blessings on him who practises it. Still, that is not the chief reason why we should practise it. We should practise it because it is our duty and God commands it. It would be a poor excuse for neglecting our parents to say that we never got any benefit out of honouring them. We do not do our duty to them for that; neither should so mercenary a consideration influence our conduct towards God.

The religion revealed to the world by Jesus Christ is a complete guide to a perfect moral life. He is the Light of the World; one that follows Him walketh not in darkness. By that Light we see everything in its true proportions, we know what value to set on everything. We have no doubts as to whence we came or whither we are going. We know our goal and we know how to get there. The different duties and occupations of life fall into their proper place in the scale of importance or necessity. The scheme is a workable scheme, it has stood the test of two thousand years, and by means of it man can live and society can thrive and prosper. No other light gives so cheery an outlook on the world and on the future. Behind the mechanism of things, under the whirl of perpetual change, apparently heedless of man and his interests, the Christian recognises the mighty love of his Father and leaves himself trustfully in His guiding hands. The future is not the inexplicable riddle that it is for the mechanical evolutionist. The Christian looks forward to it with confidence and hope. Some have said that the Christian outlook is too good to be true. They know nothing of the wonders of infinite love. In the Christian hope millions upon millions have found the source of their sweetest joy, and of patience and resignation amid the inevitable trials and sorrows of life. The Christian religion confers these and many more benefits on human life, but it would be a great mistake to suppose that we can abandon Christian teaching and continue to reap its benefits. One of the greatest benefits which the Christian religion confers on man is to furnish him with a complete and objective rule of conduct. Public opinion, custom, and human law can do something towards making a man subject his vicious propensities to right reason so that they will not threaten destruction to himself and to his fellows. But many external actions can be concealed from public opinion and human law; and the more important sphere of the inner man escapes their scrutiny altogether. Every thought, word, and deed is subject to the Christian code; no human act escapes the judgment of the Christian conscience. Human opinion and human law are liable to err; they sometimes approve of what is destructive to the best interests of human nature. They sanction divorce and the loosening of the ties of family life, though history and reason loudly protest that the family must be kept together at all costs. On these and on other scarcely less important points the Gospel of Christ is firm as a rock. Private judgment can interpret and whittle away the dead letter of the Bible: it can do nothing against the voice of the ever-living Church speaking with the authority of Him who inspired the Bible. Passion and prejudice can distort a rule in favour of individualism and selfishness: they cannot warp the judgment of unerring truth. We have only to open our eyes and ears to realise the importance of preserving the objective rule of conduct which is taught us by the religion of Jesus Christ. Moral chaos is the consequence of its rejection. Let us take a few examples from recent writers. We cannot do better than go to Germany for our first example. The rejection of the Christian standard of conduct, with its inevitable consequences, has gone furthest in Germany. Nietzsche taught that Christianity was a retrograde movement. According to him Christianity is a religion for the degenerate, anaemic, and world-weary. Christian teachers are "body despisers" and " preachers of death." If we would be on the right track we must get back to nature and the natural. This world is a good world if only we know how to enjoy it. Unfortunately the great mass of mankind are too degraded to lead a truly natural life. For that purpose a man must be full of vitality. He will have to be the product of careful breeding and training. He must be truly noble, and the only nobility is that of birth and blood. He will not be one of the common herd: he will be " superman." As such he will be distinguished by the "Will-to-power." For him the whole duty of man may be summed up in two words—"Be powerful." He will have two different standards of conduct. Towards his equals and those of the same class his conduct will be marked by restraint, regard, delicacy, and friendship. Towards others, he will conduct himself " not so much as better, but rather as an uncaged beast of prey. Here he enjoys liberty from all social restraint, the wilderness must compensate him for the tension produced by a long incarceration and enclosure in the peace of society.” For common suffering humanity he has no pity or compassion, but rather indifference and contempt. Christianity will do very well for them; they only want " herd-morality." They will always form the necessary basis on which the social pyramid will be raised. Above them will be the commercial classes, while on the top will live and reign the " superman." Many of the traits in this picture are clearly characteristic of the Prussian Junker as he has been revealed to an astonished world by his deeds of “frightfulness” during the war. If he shows himself in his true colours after the war he may safely be left to be dealt with by the police. The Scotchman, John Davidson, was as violently anti-Christian as was Nietzsche, but he had no faith in progress or the superman, and cared nothing about the future. For Davidson Nietzscheanism was merely a perverted form of Christianity, and he would have none of it. ‘His Antichrist is Christ, whose body and blood And doctrine of miraculous rebirth Became the Overman: Back-of-beyond, Or—what's the phrase? Outside good-and-evil; That's his millennium, and we'll none of it. I want the world to be much more the world; Men to be men; and women, women; all Adventure, courage, instinct, passion, power.’ Davidson's philosophy is a glorification of the animal appetites and an exhortation to all to enjoy life while it lasts. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Mr. Bernard Shaw has many affinities with Nietzsche, whose conception of the superman he adopted. Still, there are great differences between the two writers. Nietzsche is individualistic, while Mr. Shaw is Socialistic. The latter does not hope for the regeneration of mankind from the superman, but from the State. It is in and through the State that the individual is to be blessed. He does not share Nietzsche's contempt for pity, nor think that Nature's methods should be imitated in the elimination of the weak and the unfit. Society should have a care for its weaker members. The only heaven that man can look forward to is to make the best of this world. "Be what you want to be, follow instinct," says Mr. Shaw, "and you will be on the right road." All these writers are men of ability, but their schemes for the conduct of human life contain many glaring inconsistencies and contradictions. They neither agree with each other nor with themselves.* They show that the rejection of Christian teaching and Christian morality leads inevitably to the mental and moral chaos from which the Light of the World rescued us two thousand years ago. Professor Karl Pearson and others appear to suppose that all that is necessary is to lay down and teach to the young a code of rational ethics. Unfortunately, most of us have had the same experience as the Latin philosopher: ‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.’ " I see the better and approve it; I follow the worse." It is not only that man's intellect is so feeble, so liable to be warped and twisted by passion and self-interest, especially in questions of conduct. His will is, if anything, weaker still, and fails so lamentably in the execution of what it knows to be right. It has been proved by the experience of ages that man cannot live a decent and rational life without the help of God. All that God need do to punish man for his rejection of Himself is simply to leave him alone. Left to himself, he quickly becomes the prey of his passions and demonstrates the necessity of religion for man. The argument has never been put more forcibly than by St. Paul, and we cannot do better than ponder over his words. Of the pagan philosophers of old St. Paul writes: " So that they are inexcusable, because that when they knew God, they have not glorified Him as God, nor given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts and their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise they became fools. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness to dishonour their own bodies among themselves,... For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that which is against nature. And in like manner the men also, leaving the natural use of the woman, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men, working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things that are not fitting; being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy."* The terrible picture was truthfully drawn two thousand years ago; it has stood the test of time, and is as faithful to the facts now as it was when first drawn. Experience proves only too fully that man stands in dire need of religion. The modern cry of "Back to Nature" means back to the pagan immorality described by St. Paul. Would that the evidence were less clear than it is. We cannot hope for salvation merely from the teaching of rational ethics. That would enlighten the mind, but it would not strengthen the will. And it is the will above all that needs strengthening. The theory of mechanical evolution only adds to the difficulty. As a recent writer says:

* Cf. L. S. Thornton, Conduct and the Supernatural.

* Rom. i. 20-31.

“On the part of scientific men the study of evolution in general, and social evolution in particular, has given rise to a sort of scientific pessimism.... The latest teachings of modern science have thus thrown a sort of pall over the human mind and introduced a new philosophy —a philosophy of despair, it may be called, because it robs its adherents of all hope in any conscious alteration of the course of nature with respect to man, and denies the efficacy of effort."* As the Catholic Church constantly insists, our only hope is in the grace of God and in religion. The religion of Jesus Christ not only enlightens the mind; above all it strengthens and braces the will so as to enable it not only to keep in check the lower appetites and make them obedient to reason, but to climb the loftiest heights of heroic virtue. It is not necessary to appeal to past history in proof of it; every Catholic experiences it whenever he prays or worthily approaches the Sacraments.

* L. F. Ward, Applied Sociology, p. 14.