Chapter V: Religion and Conscience

THE “conscientious objector” has attracted considerable attention, but I doubt whether his significance has been fully appreciated. He says that his conscience condemns war and so he refuses to join the army. When cases have come before them the tribunals have endeavoured as a rule to satisfy themselves whether the objections to war were really conscientious. If they appeared to be really conscientious the tribunals as a rule and as a matter of expediency respected them and exempted the objector from active fighting. He was still liable to be employed on ambulance or hospital work, or in digging trenches. This may be a good practical way of getting out of the difficulty, but it can hardly be called a satisfactory solution of it. As long as the " conscientious objectors " are not very numerous no great harm follows from the course pursued. But if they became very numerous it might seriously interfere with the efficiency of the army. It is worth while to try to solve the question on its merits and on the ground of principle apart from mere expediency. This is what a writer in the Times attempted to do a few weeks ago. His solution may be regarded as representative of educated, non-Catholic opinion in this country. In common with certain Anglican correspondents who had written to the Times on the subject, he admitted that conscience is a sacred thing. He accepted, in other words, the Christian notion of conscience. It is the herald, the voice of God, and as such it must be obeyed rather than any merely human authority. The battle for freedom of conscience, he wrote, was fought and won in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Liberty of conscience must now be granted to everyone. Englishmen at least have no idea of persecuting anyone for conscience’ sake. All this sounds very comforting and reassuring. But let us be sure that we understand what it means. The defenders of the conscientious objectors, the writer says, fail to see the point of the present question. “There is an essential difference,” he goes on to say, "between liberty to hold opinions as individuals and liberty to act upon them as members of a community." He grants that individuals have the right to hold what opinions they choose and that therein lies liberty of conscience. He denies that men have the right to this liberty with regard to their actions as members of a community. The writer obviously confounds liberty of conscience with so-called liberty or freedom of thought. No man can be prevented from thinking as he likes by external restraint, but for all that thought is not free. Freedom is an attribute of the will, not of the intellect. Every man has the right to think what is true — the truth shall make you free. Falsehood and error have no rights, least of all the right to freedom. The religious wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were not fought for liberty of thought. Catholics and Protestants alike fought for liberty to put their beliefs in practice. In the spacious days of good Queen Bess Catholics might hold what opinions they liked on the subject of the Mass, but it was felony to say or to assist at Mass. They might hold what opinions they chose with regard to the royal supremacy, but it was treason openly to deny it. The sacredness of conscience and the liberty of conscience cannot be defended by drawing a distinction between the rights of the individual to form opinions and his rights as a member of society to act upon them. The writer in the Times appealed to the authority of John Stuart Mill in support of the distinction. None the less it is clear that it is destructive of conscience in the Christian sense. The consciences of the early Christian martyrs forbade them to offer incense before the image of the Roman Emperor. The act was idolatrous, it was offering divine worship to a statue or at best to a man, and it was clearly against the dictates of the Christian conscience. Whether as private individuals or as members of society, the early Christians refused to be guilty of idolatry. The whole power of the Roman Empire was employed to compel them to do what the great majority of their fellow-citizens approved of and practised as a part of the national religion. The martyrs died rather than submit, and the Christian Church has honoured them ever since for their constancy. The battle for liberty of conscience was fought and won by the Christian martyrs in the first centuries of the Christian era. The blood of the martyrs put a seal on the Christian doctrine of conscience. The rights of conscience henceforth became indissolubly associated with their heroic self-sacrifice. Liberty of conscience is destroyed by explaining that it means freedom to form opinions but not to act upon them. If conscience means anything it means that the moral judgment of the individual prescribes a definite course of action. If the individual be hindered from pursuing the definite course of action which his conscience prescribes he has no liberty of conscience while the hindrance lasts. He may be hindered by the majority of the citizens of the country to which he belongs, but the hindrance is none the less an interference with liberty of conscience. To say that the consciences of the majority prescribe interference, and that the majority should prevail, is really to abandon the doctrine of the sacredness of conscience, and to appeal to brute force. There is no special sacredness in mere numbers. The majority in the early Christian centuries was on the side of idolatry. Many would say that the majority is generally on the wrong side, especially at the beginning of a controversy. So that to say that the conscience of the individual should submit to the judgment of the community or of the majority in a community is really to deny liberty of conscience. To say that an individual has freedom to form what convictions he pleases but not to act upon them, is also to deny liberty of conscience. The same conclusions obviously hold good if the majority in a community seeks to impose an obligation on individual members which their consciences refuse to accept and condemn as wrong. If the conscientious objector is to be met satisfactorily we must go deeper than the distinction between a man's right to form opinions and to act upon them. The cause of all the trouble lies in the Protestant theory of private judgment. Protestantism puts the Bible in the hands of everyone and tells him that the ultimate authority in questions of faith and morals is the Bible as interpreted by his own private judgment. The private judgment of the conscientious objector tells him that the Bible condemns war and forbids Christians to wage war. The private judgment of other people, on the contrary, tells them that the Bible does nothing of the sort. It condemns unjust wars, but not those that are waged in self-defence or for some good and sufficient cause. The contradiction is flagrant and it cannot be ascribed to God. The Bible is the Word of God and cannot teach contradictory doctrines. Conscience, according to traditional Christian teaching, is the voice of God, the herald or the messenger of God. Mistake may arise there. What purports to be the voice of God may be the voice of self-love, interest, or cowardice. The messenger may have mistaken the message. The result is not a certain conscience, not an assured conviction that a proposed action is wrong; that is the traditional notion of conscience; but a private opinion or view that a proposed action cannot be right. There we have the origin of the interpretation put upon liberty of conscience by the writer in the Times. Liberty of conscience means for him liberty to form private opinions. But then an opinion is not a certain conscience; in no sense can an opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of an action be attributed to God. Conscience in that sense cannot be called the voice or the herald of God, nor is there anything specially sacred about it. Tom Jones, the conscientious objector, is too often mistaken about other matters of importance for us to pay much attention to his views about the lawfulness of war. Especially is he likely to be mistaken when it is his interest to be so. And so his objections to join the army may be put aside without interfering with the rights of conscience. Private opinions have not the privileges of truth, and no injustice is done if lawful authority compels them to yield to the exigencies of the public good.

It was quite different with the Christian conscience in its struggle with the Roman authorities in the early centuries of the Christian era. Conscience was not regarded then as an opinion; it was a certain judgment, a conviction that a certain action was wrong. Conscience did not announce or discover a doctrine or any general principle of conduct. It was a practical judgment which applied some well-known and certain rule of conduct to a particular case. In the case in point the general principle was—Idolatry is sinful. That truth was taught in the Bible without ambiguity or possibility of its being explained away. The Christian Church taught it authoritatively as well. When, then, a Christian was told that he must perform an act of undoubted idolatry and offer divine worship to a statue, his conscience revolted against the mandate and he died a martyr's death rather than obey. He did not ask to be exempted on the ground of a private opinion of his own; there was no room for mistake; he was absolutely sure of his ground; it was guaranteed by the common teaching of the universal and infallible Church. All this leads to the conclusion that a man who refuses to join the army and to fight in a just war when ordered by the highest authority in the country to do so should not be called a conscientious objector. It is not in the sacred name of conscience that he objects, and the rights of conscience should not be invoked to shield his disloyalty.