IF NOT CHRISTIANin,

WHAT?

by

J&mes M. Gillis, C* S« P»





IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour; produced by

the National Council of Catholic Men through the

courtesy of the National Broadcasting Company

and its associated stations.

(On Sundays from November 3 to December 22, 1935)

I. Atheism: No God, No Religion.

II. Pantheism : The Worship of Nature.

III. Humanism ; Man His Own God.

IV. Hegelianism : The State as God.

V. Hedonism : The Religion of Pleasure.

VI. Aestheticism : The Religion of Art and

Music.

VII. Determinism : Submission to Fate.

VIII. Shall We Look to Geneva or to Beth-
lehem?

by

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.,

Editor of The Catholic World

National Council of Catholic Men
Producer of the Catholic Hour,

1312 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.,

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



Imprimatur:

JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.,

Bishop of F’ort Wayn



DEDICATED

WITH ADMIRATION
TO ALL THOSE MILITANT DEFENDERS OF RELIGION

WHO SEE WHERE THE FIGHT IS HOTTEST
AND WHO FEAR NOT

TO DO BATTLE

WITH OUR MOST POWERFUL OPPONENT
SHEER ATHEISM.



INTRODUCTION

When England threatens Italy or when Germany de-

velops once again as a menace to France, Russia looks on

with delight. Communism stands to profit from the dissen-

sions of Capitalism. Similarly when one Christian creed at-

tacks another, Atheism watches the conflict with malicious

satisfaction. It is time, therefore, that all who hold to the

first principle of religion, belief in God, should avoid in-

ternecine warfare and combine against the common foe,

Atheism. The antagonist is big enough and strong enough

to demand all our attention and the union of all the forces

that fight for faith.



ATHEISM: NO GOD, NO RELIGION

Address delivered on November 3, 1935

When a clergyman confronts the subject, “Athe-

ism”, the chances are a thousand to one that he will

launch forth upon a proof of the existence of God,

This time I follow a different procedure. Proof of

the existence of God is wasted on those who are

perverse enough to deny God. King David in the

Book of Psalms spoke none too vigorously: “Only

the fool hath said in his heart ‘There is no God’.”

Cardinal Newman, a kind of modern prophet, says

that the existence of God is as plain as one’s own ex-

istence. If any man question that fact, set him the

task of explaining how there can be a man if there

be no God. That sweet little problem will keep your

atheist busy for the rest of his life and, being busy,

he may be silent, “a consummation devoutly to be

wished.” In fact you can embarrass him quite as

much if you ask him to explain the origin of any-

thing, a grain of sand, a drop of water, a speck of

dust, an atom of hydrogen or what you will. You

need not quite overwhelm him by demanding to

know how the seven seas, the seventy times seven

mountain ranges, the dome of heaven with its incom-

putable number of universes, came into being. Give

the poor fellow not an ocean to explain but a pebble

on the shore of the ocean, not the Milky Way but

only as much star dust as you could pick up on the

point of a needle. Then sit back and watch him

squirm and strain and burst a blood vessel as he

wrestles with the real Riddle of the Universe : How

did something, anything come out of nothing? Don’t

let him wander; don’t let him orate, don’t let him

fool you with hifalutin’ psuedo-scientific verbiage;



6 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

don’t let him throw dust into the air unless he first

explains where he got the dust and the air.

Almost all atheists seem to imagine that a group

of theologians met together in secret session and

said to one another, “Let us concoct a dogma and

impose it on the people”. And lo, they came forth

from the hall of conspiracy with a formula which

they taught men, women, and children, to say; “I

believe in God.” But theologians didn’t invent God.

Man—simple man, not perhaps the man in the street
for there weren’t any streets, but the man in the

woods, the man on the mountain, the man under

the starry sky, the man on the shore of the sea

—

came to the instant conclusion that there must be

a God, for the self-same reason and by the same

instinctive logic as Robinson Crusoe came to the

swift realization that there must be a man on the

island because he say a human foot-print. God

didn’t make the world, couldn’t make the world,

without leaving all over it hints, suggestions, tell-

tale evidence that He had been here. “The heavens

shew forth the glory of God”, says the Psalmist,

“and the firmament declareth the work of His

hands.”

Man, primitive man, as yet unspoiled with

curious, intricate, impossible philosophies, had a

firm grasp on the fundamental principle of science;

“Nothing comes from nothing
;
whatever is made had

a maker.”

And it is significant that after Immanuel Kant

had rejected that simple reasoning as proof of the

existence of God, his disciples went straight on

from where he left off and rejected it as proof of the

existence of man. “If any man”, said Cardinal



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 7

Manning, “pretends to doubt his own existence, he

is trifling with me” ; but the logical outcome of the

denial of God’s existence is the denial of one’s own

existence. And that. I think, is what the other great

English Cardinal, John Henry Newman, had in mind

when he said, “The Being of God is as certain to

me as the certainty of my own existence.”

However, I don’t intend to follow that line of

thought today. But I am going to embarrass the

atheist in the most effective way possible ; by agree-

ing with him. For the sake of the argument, I am

going to give up the argument. I surrender; I

yield, lock, stock, and barrel. The atheist is right;

there is no God. Then what? “Then what?”

echoes the atheist; “Then nothing; that’s the end,

it’s all over, we’re through.” Well, the atheist may

be through, but I am not. My mind is differently
constructed. It refuses to stop dead and cease to

function when some •'ries “Finis", as a horse

stops when his master saj's “Whoa!” The mind of

man is a contrary animal. If one tells me that there

is no God and that is all, that is the end of the

mental process on the subject, my mind rebels, be-
comes fractious; instead of stopping or slowing

down, it runs on with leaps and bounds, trying to

answer the question “What then?”.

The difficulty is that God has so woven Himself

into the warp and woof of civilization
;
has so built

Himself into the fabric of human institutions; has

so deeply ensconced Himself in the heart and mind

of man, in our thoughts and affections, our manners

and habits and customs, that you can’t get rid of

God without setting the whole world askew, without

wrenching the heart of man and emptying his life of



8 IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

almost all that it contains. It would be a mistake

to imagine that if God goes, nothing happens but

that churches fall into ruins and priests perish. A
great many more institutions than churches depend

upon the fact of God. I don’t mean merely schools,

colleges, hospitals, orphan asylums, and multitudes

of other appendages of religion. I mean courts of

justice, bulwarks of law and order; I mean nations,

governments, and all humanitarian organizations; I

mean the family, the nucleus of society, and society

itself
;
I mean art and music and literature : under-

stand, not merely “Christian” art, Giotto and Man-

tegna and Raphael and Leonardo and Michelangelo,

not merely primitive art or the art of the Renais-

sance, but all art
;
not merely sacred music, the aus-

tere chant of the Church and the polyphony of Pales-

trina, but Mozart and Liszt and Brahms and Beetho-

ven; I mean all music; not merely religious litera-

ture, the psalms of David, the book of Job, the

prophets and the Gospels; I mean all literature;

and when I say colleges I don’t mean Catholic col-

leges or denominational colleges, I mean all colleges

and all universities, all education, all culture, all

civilization.

I hope that no one will think it necessary to re-

mind me that art and music and literature are pro-

duced by men who profess no belief in God, and that

educational institutions exist in which God is ig-

nored or ridiculed or rejected; nor need I be told

that there are men who either neglect or refuse to

pray, but who none the less live what is usually

called a moral life. But these persons are one and

all worshippers of God. God is the True, the Good,

and the Beautiful. Whoever seeks the Truth or



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 9

loves the Good, or strives in prose or in verse, in

bronze, in marble, on canvas, or through the insub-

stantial, ethereal, elusive, evanescent medium of

melody and harmony, to express the Beautiful, is

really, though he know it not, striving for God. The

flower is not aware that it turns to the sun, the

river doesn’t know that it rushes to the sea, the

entire universe, plunging along through space at

inconceivable speed, is not aware that it is progres-

sing towards a Goal. And so man, who should

know, may not know that in the very attempt to

produce poetry or art or music he is seeking to evoke

God.

Now if the atheist could indeed exile God from

the Universe, with God would go all Beauty, all

Good, all Truth. I will not say that these things

accompany God into exile, for they are not accom-

paniments, not companions, not expressions of the

Being of God, they are the essence of God. If God

goes they go, just as inevitably as body and soul,

the essence of man, go wherever man goes.

The atheist doesn’t see these inevitable implica-

tions of the rejection of God. But then the atheist

is notoriously superficial in his thinkng. He doesn’t

even realize that if you get rid of God, ipso facto you

get rid of the Ten Commandmnts. I speak of the

sincere but deluded atheist, not of the immoralist

who consciously aims to abolish the moral law by

getting rid of God. The innocent atheist (so to

speak) may imagine that when God goes, “Thou shalt

not kill, and Thou shalt not steal” will remain be-

hind. They can no more remain than the smile on

the face of the Cheshire cat can remain after the cat

is gone. Men may talk of a naturalistic ethics,



10 IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

ethics based on reason alone, and there may be

such an ethics for Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or

Eppistetus, or Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry

Thoreau. But your naturalistic ethics simply

won’t do for the mass of mankind. If you say

to the ordinary man, “Thou shalt Not!” he an-

swers “Says Who?” If you reply “Says Epictetus!”

or “Says Hammurabi”, or “Says Lao Tse”, he will

laugh in your face. Even if you refer the Command-

ments to Moses, that too will be ineffective. For

mankind at large (and I don’t mind admitting that

includes me and I dare say you) there is only one

sanction that is in the last analysis valid. “Thus

sayeth the Lord”, the Lord God, Judge of the

Living and the Dead, the Awful Infinite Ruler of

our Eternal Destiny. Remove that final sanction

and you tear down the fabric of society. Tear down

the fabric? Say rather tear up the foundations.

For those who love bare hard cold logic, I pre-

sent the argument in skeleton form: No God, No

Law of God, all law is of man
;
if all law is of man,

why should man obey? Must I, a man, bend my

head and crook my knee to another man? Not if I

am a man. Do you tell me : not to another man but

to a body of men. To a legislature? To an aggre-

gation of moral philosphers? To a board of uni-

versity professors of the science of ethics ? To some

sociological society? But to us, or to any inde-

pendent thinker, what competency on morality has a

legislature which can be packed with certain mental

and moral mediocrities, low grade politicians whose

only virtue is “regularity”. Do you think to capture

my intelligence and compel my will by the mandates
of such a legislature?



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 11

Or with some more pretentious group of self-

styled humanitarians, or professors of moral philoso-

phy? But I think I would rather obey a low-brow

legislature than a highbrow university body. There

is a chance that the legislature, though composed

of men of mediocre mentality, might still retain

some modicum of common sense, but your university

group would very likely be in favor of such ethical

monstrosities as birth control, free, easy and fre-

quent divorce, sterilization, eugenics, and euthanasia.

Believe me, the people at large maintain whatever

degree of moral sanity they have, because they recog-

nize the absurdity and the immorality of their

would-be mentors from the universities.

No! let’s delay no more upon this point. Here

and now I declare my own conviction and, I believe

the conviction of millions of my fellow-men, not all

of us being unintelligent: if there is no divine sanc-

tion behind a human law I will feel myself free to

disobey that law whenever and however I please.

In my morality as in my religion, I refuse like the
Israelites to bend the knee to Baal. Baal, you un-

derstand, was a false god, an intruder in the place

of the true God. So, any law-making body, any

group of men high or low, philosophical or political,

that pretends to take the place of God, commands

my obedience, and limits my liberty as a substitute
for a banished God, is to me a usurper and a blas-

phemer. I would then no more obey a senate and a

house, or any court, high or low, than I would con-

form to the behavior-maxims of Confucius, or the

moral mandates of Zoroaster. If there be no law

of God I will not obey the law of man, because the



12 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT ?

only reason I now obey the law of man is that I ad-

mit it to be an expression of the law of God.

But I have a wider and deeper problem for the

atheist. If he take God away from man, he must

give man something to take the place of God. Tak-

ing away God leaves an enormous vacuum not only

in the world but in the human heart. You might

better take the sun out of the heavens or the earth

from under man’s feet than take away his God.

Again and again we quote that profound and utterly

true sentence of St. Augustine, “Thou hast made us

for Thyself, 0 God, and our hearts are restless until

they find rest in Thee.” At first hearing that utter-

ance sounds mystical, but it is not mere mysticism;

it is in epitome the history of man. It may seem at

first blush theological, but it is really psychological.

Nothing satisfies the human heart but God. True,

in times of decadence as it is written, “the people

sat down to eat, and drink, and they rose up to play”.

There are rollicking songs about “Wine, woman,

and song”, and there was the cry of the degenerate

mob in the days of the later Caesars, Panem et

circenses! “Give us food and entertainment!” But

did not the Wisest of Men say, “Man doth not live by

bread alone” ? If man were content and happy

when filled with food, or for that matter wine
;
if he

sought no further joy than the satisfaction of lust;

if a house and a home and a family could answer all

his requirements; if he would even remain quiet

when surfeited with riches or with power, the his-

tory of our race would have been much more ignoble

than it is. But man has always hungered and

thirsted for something besides meat and drink, and

though he does, to his shame, seem for awhile to be



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 13

content with the base pleasures of the flesh, they

don’t satisfy him for long. His most important

craving is really for intangible, immaterial, spiritual

things. Otherwise there would have been no art, no

music, no poetry, no high literature, no culture, no

civilization. Indeed if you seek another axiomatic

utterance as profound, as beautiful, and as true as

that of St. Augustine, you have it in the 41st Psalm,

“As the hart panteth after the fountains of water ; so

my soul panteth after thee, 0 God. My soul hath

thirsted after the strong living God. . . My tears

have been my bread day and night, whilst it is said

to me daily : Where is thy God ?”

Now, there is no wisdom quarreling with that

trait of human nature. One who finds fault with an

elementary passion of the human heart, denies it and

attempts to frustrate it, is guilty of unnatural crime.

But the sin and the blunder (who was the epigram-

matist who said it was a sin? it was worse; it was a

blunder), the sin, the crime, and the blunder of

atheism is that it attempts to tear out of the heart

of man his cravng for the spiritual, his hunger and

thirst for the Infinite, and that it gives, and can

give, no substitute for God and religion.

The true God being abolished, men turn to sticks

and stones in place of God. They have worshipped a

sacred bull, a cat, a crocodile, a black stone fallen

from the heavens: they have even been guilty of

the unspeakable depravity of worshipping a Nero

or a Domitian or even Domitian’s horse. We have
seen in our own day that since the Russians peas-

ants were forbidden to worship God they have filed

in a never ending procession into the tomb of Lenin

in Moscow to worship (for that is what it means, it



14 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

is not a mere pathological curiosity: it is religion)

to worship an embalmed body of a man who hated

most of his fellow-men, slaughtered the helpless

imperial family, father, mother, and children, like

so many sheep in a shambles, deluged his own coun-

try in blood, erected and perpetuated the most

galling tyranny the world has ever seen, and left

behind him as a legacy the command to conquer the

world in the name of class hatred. A pretty god in-
deed, but that is the kind of god you get when you

abolish the good God.

To conclude: the two fundamental wrongs done

in the name of atheism are, first, the obliteration of

the only effective moral code, the Commandments;

and secondly the annihilation, or since it cannot be

annihilated, the distortion of the religious instinct

in the human heart. One is a crime against society,

the other a crime against man. It is futile to ask

which is the greater crime; the important fact is

that you cannot destroy God without ruining society

and demoralizing man.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 15

PANTHEISM: THE WORSHIP OF
NATURE

Address delivered on November 10, 1935

I had occasion to say, in the first talk of this

series, that man peremptorily demands a God, and

that if you take away from him the true God, he

will fashion to himself a false God ; if you deny him

a holy God, he will substitute a wicked god; if you

drive out of his head the idea of a God of majesty,

he will turn to some base thing and worship it as

God; if you persuade him that there is no living

God, he will manufacture a god with his own hands,

fall upon his knees and worship what he himself

has made. Isaias, prophet of the one true God, found

it necessary to use every rhetorical device at his

command (and be it said in passing, he was the

greatest master of eloquence that ever lived) to

warn his people away from the worship of false

gods, foul gods, obscene gods, bloodthirsty gods,

ridiculous gods of the heathen. On one occasion he

cried out in magnificent wrath, “How long do you

halt between two ways
;
if Baal be God, serve Baal

;

but if the Lord be God, serve the Lord !” His daring

them to serve the devil-god Baal was of course mere-

ly rhetorical, he would have blasted them with

scorn if they had taken him at his word.

Another time he flouts idolatry with ridicule:

“The smith”, he says, “hath wrought with his file,

with coals and with hammers he hath formed it. .

.

the carpenter hath stretched out his rule, he hath

formed it with a plane. . . he hath fashiond it

round with a compass. . . he bath cut down cedars,

taken the holm and the oak that stood among the



16 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

trees of the forest, he hath planted the pine tree

which the rain hath nourished, and it hath served

men for fuel
;
he took thereof and warmed himself

;

and he kindled it and baked bread ; but of the rest he

made a god and adored it. . . with part of it he

dressed his meat, he boiled pottage and was filled and

was warmed and said ‘Aha, I am warm’; but the

residue thereof he made a god. . . he boweth down

before it. . . saying: ‘Deliver me, for thou art my

God.’
”

By dint of such mordant sarcasm as this, alter-

nating with straight denunciation and exhortation,

the chosen people were kept from the worship of

gods made by the hand of man, and worse, gods con-

ceived in the foul imagination of degenerates who

had forgotten the All-Holy God of the primitive

revelation. Indeed a god of iron dug up from the

clean earth and wrought on the forge by the smith,

or a god of wood cut from some particularly fine

oak or cedar and fashioned perhaps by a carver of no

small skill, was a thing of beauty and dignity com-

pared with other objects animate and inanimate

before which the degraded heathen abased them-

selves, a cat, as in Persia, a crocodile that crawled

out of the muddy Nile and found itself guarded

with .as jealous care as a king, fed with choicest

foods, not infrequently with live human beings; or a

sacred bull, or a white elephant, even an itchinp

scratching lousy ape; or a black stone, possibly p.

meteor fallen from the sky at Mecca centuries before

Mohammed. Men even fell so low as to incarnate

their lusts, personify their own passions, deify them,

and worship them. Venus was the goddess of lust.

Mars the god of war, and Jupiter of murder and



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 17

adultery. One of the many historians who record

the utter decay of decency in the late Roman Empire

says that the Romans were guilty of “the incredible

baseness of deifying the man”. He might have said

not the man but the monster, Caligula, Commodus,

Vitellius, Elagabalus were worshipped even though

they were incredibly bloodthirsty and addicted to

unnatural vice. Some of them indeed so befouled

themselves that they became the prey of worms

while still alive.

In our disgust we might perhaps be tempted to

exclaim, “Since the passion for religion can be

turned to such base uses, let us by all means root out

that passion from the human heart.” The better

logic would be to purify religion. Love, human

love as we a;il know, though at its best the sweetest

thing in nature, can when misdirected become ab-

normally filthy. It would be bad psychology, to say

the least, to attempt to tear out love by the roots

and cast it away forever. As with the love of man

for woman, so is it with the love of man for his God.

It is essentially a noble passion; potentially it is

both transcendently beautiful and abysmally ugly. It

may be exalted or degraded, purified or debased, but

it cannot be eliminated, still less annihilated. If

man’s religious instinct sometimes leads him into the

morass, the proper thing to do is to lift him and

direct him to the heights.

One thing is certain: the human heart is in-

curably religious. If by coercion or ridicule you

compel man to surrender belief in the One True Holy

God, he will, as we have seen, create for himself a

hundred, or a thousand other gods, filthy gods, mon-

strous gods, gods of lust, and blood, Molechs, Baals,



18 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

Venuses, Astarthes. If you take away Ormuzd, the

god of light, man will turn to Ahriman, the god of

iarkness.

Good God or bad god, true God or false god,

kind God or cruel god, man will have some god. The

God-idea is indestructible. Believers in God may

take heart in that fact; unbelievers should take

warning. You can no more blot out God than you

can snuff out the light of the sun as if it were a

candle. We hear nowadays of rockets being made in
which madmen plan to project themselves to the

moon. If ever these projectiles are perfected I dare

say that some insane adventurer will call for a vol-

unteer army to be shot forth from the earth, pierce

the atmosphere and assault the sun. Crazy notion?

Delirious fancy? Yes, but not more absurd than the

assault of the street corner atheist, or for that

matter the university atheist, upon the impregnable

God or even upon the idea of God in the mind of

man.

Do I say street-corner, soap-box blasphemers and

class-room propagandists? Add poliiticians. A
former French premier, Viviani, made the bombastic

pronunciamento, “We make war on God! We will
extinguish the lights of heaven.” Well, Viviani has

been extinguished; but as late as last night, as I

looked a:loft, the lights of heaven were still there.

However, the impossibility of the success of atheism

does not lessen the guilt of the atheist. He is like

some drunken lout who should stumble into a labora-

tory and start fumbling with chemicals that may

blow him and all about him to atoms. Indeed the

atheist is fooling with a force more mysterious and



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 19

more powerful than anything that can be contained

in a test-tube ; more mysterious than the Death-Ray

of Science, or if you prefer, of scientific romance.

What would ensue if the atheist really did extinguish

belief in God cannot be imagined; in a;ll the tragic

history of this planet there has been no event that

could serve, I will not say as a parallel, but even as

a symbol of that universal cataclysm.

To return to our more immediate topic—not
Atheism but Pantheism.

As I have been trying to say, if you take away

God from the universe, you leave an enormous void,

a vacuum. But man, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

The vacuum must be filled, and since it is a huge

vacuum, in fact limitless, infinite, its place can be

taken only by something immeasurably vast. To

take the place of God there must be something as

big as God. So, a happy thought seems to have

struck some philosophers : God being gone from the

world, why not let the world be God? It isn’t a

new idea. There are no new ideas. In fact it is as

old as the history of thought, for, be it understood,

since thought began, thought has fought against

thought, ideas have been in a battle royal in which

only the most powerful could survive. But Panthe-

ism is a powerful idea. It is more than an idea, it is

a philosophy and the philosophy has been beau-

tifully aided and abetted by poetry. No small part

of the noblest, purest, profoundest poetry is the

poetry of pantheism, or poetry that smacks of pan-

theism. Even saints have written poetry that could

be interpreted in a pantheistic sense
;
witness that of

St. John of the Cross. He was poet, mystic, and at



20 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

the same time an exact theologian. But he writes,

‘‘My beloved (God) is the mountains

The solitary wooded valleys

The far islands

The murmuring rivers

The whisper of the amorous winds.” *

One of the most powerful outbursts of the poetic

instinct in any literature, sacred or profane, is that

of David in the 148th psalm, a poem in which,

though the royal prophet does not identify the uni-

verse with God, he addresses Nature as if it could

hear and speak, sing, shout, and praise God,

“Praise ye the Lord, O ye sun and moon; praise Him,
all ye stars and light.

“Praise Him ye heaven of heavens and let all the waters
that are above the earth praise the name of the Lord.

“Praise ye the Lord from the earth, all ye deeps, fire,

hail, snow, ice, stormy winds. . . Mountains and all ye hills,

fruitful trees and all cedars.”

In the exuberance of his imagination, the royal

poet in another psalm (97) dedares, “The rivers

shall clap their hands and the mountains shall re-

joice.”

Now all this is of course the familiar poetic de-

vice of apostrophe. David apostrophizes fire, hail,

snow, ice, rivers, mountains, as another poet apos-

trophizes Mont Blanc, or another the west wind,

“Wild Spirit which art moving everywhere,

* It seems a pity to be obliged to offer so crude

a translation of the melodious original:

“Mi Amando las mantanas.
Los valles solitaries nemorosos.

La rios sonorosos.
Las insulas extranas.

El silbo do los aires amorosos.”



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 21

Destroyer and Preserver, hear Oh hear!”

“Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

Poor Shelley ! Mad Shelley ! He was or thought

he was an atheist. But even the atheist must pray.

So he prays to the wind. Significant. Symbolic.

The prayers of the atheist are wafted not up to God

but away into space. Praying to the wind is like

writing one’s name in water.

Poets are entitled to this license. But pantheis-

tic philosophers take poetry as sober fact. And so

you find Spinoza and Fichte and Hegel, serious sys-

tematic thinkers, solemn as owls, and like owls pre-

ferring darkness to light, declaring not by way of

figure of speech but as the literal truth that God is

eternal substance
;
that the universe is God

;
that He

is identical with the world, that God is all that is (a

true proposition truly understood) but that—and
here is where their logic plays a trick on them

—

since God is all that is, all that is is God, a mon-

strous and blasphemous falsehood. St. Paul speaks

of those who are wise in their own conceits and

says that being wise they become fools. He must

have had such pompous philosophers in mind. There

were sophists in his day, as in ours. For let us

see: If all that is is God, then the savage Indians

in our northwest country were philosophically and

theologically correct when they referred to Rainier

(I think they called it Tacoma) as “the Mountain

that is God”. And the sunworshippers, ancient

Parsees and modem Arabs, who prostrate them-
selves before the orb of day and make their prayers

to him; and the fire-worshippers, and the ancient

Druids who assembled the people in groves, wor-



22 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

shipped the oak and the mistletoe ; and the idolaters

of Mecca who grovdled before the black rock—all
were right.

Now I do confess that in all this there is more

beauty and dignity than in the gross idolatry of

which we have previously spoken. It does seem

noble at first sight to worship the sun, the moon,

and the stars, or a handsome, venerable oak, or a

giant sequoia, or a meteorite shot down from heaven

in a blaze of glory. But if all that is is God, we

have to go further than oceans and suns and groves

of trees. A toad, a rat, an earthworm, or other
vermin, even the maggots that infest a running sore

or devour the carcass of a fallen beast, these too are

God if all that is is God. The Scotch poet Bobby

Burns, a coarse fellow as everyone knows, wrote a

poem to a field mouse, and made the poor little

timorous beastic rather pathetic, but he wrote also

to a louse on a lady’s bonnet. He made these vile

creatures the subject of his song; but the pantheist

if true to his creed must address not poems but

prayers to them.

Such an outcome of the notion that all is God, is

repulsive. But when you come to think a second

time, it is quite as abominable to adore a mountain

or an oak tree as a rat or a toad or a cobra. After

all, pantheism is idolatry and idolatry is a crime

against reason as well as against God.

Really, there is no excuse for Spinoza. He

should have read St. Augustine—perhaps he did.
Then why did he not take to heart the familiar

passage from the tenth book of the Confessions?

Augustine finds nature beautiful not so much in it-

self but as a hint and shadow of the beauty of God.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 23

He values nature in itself but still more because it

leads to God. “I asked the earth and it said ‘I am

not He’. I asked the sea and the depths and the

creeping things that have life and they answered,

‘We are not thy God, look above us’. I asked the

breezes and the gales, and the whole air with its

inhabitants said to me ‘Anaximenes is in error, I am

not God.’ I asked the heaven, the sun, the moon

and the stars. ‘We too’, said they, ‘are not the God

whom thou seekest.’ And I said to all the creat-

ures that surrounded the doors of my fleshy senses,

‘Ye have said to me of my God that ye are not He;

tell me somewhat of Him.’ And with a great voice

they exclaimed ‘It is He that hath made us’.”

If Spinoza, who was a Jew, didn’t know August-

ine, at least he might have read the still more an-

cient rabbinic legend about Abraham : “When Abra-

ham began to reflect upon the nature of God he at

first took the stars for deities, because of their

lustre and beauty. But when he realized that they

were outshone by the moon, he thought of the moon

as Deity. The moon’s light, however, faded before

the light of the sun, and made him think of the latter

as Deity. Yet at night the light of the sun also dis-

appeared. There must be something in the world

greater than all these constellations, mused Abra-

ham. Thus gradually he rose from the deification

of Nature to the God of Nature.”

Man therefore must not mistake Nature for God,
but must rise from nature to God. If I stand by the

cataract of Niagara I am at first stricken silent with
awe but when I catch my breath and can pray, I
shall not pray to the cataract but to its Creator. If

while walking in the woods, I hear the wind whis-



24 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

pering and am reminded of the Pentecostal coming

of the Holy Spirit, I shall pray to the Holy Spirit

and not to the wind. If in the wilderness “I lift up

mine eyes to the hills from whence my help shall

come”, I will not pray to the hills but to the God

Whose throne is upon the everlasting hills. For

what I am seeking is God, not His handiwork, not

His footstool, not the fringe of His garment
;
not His

smile on the face of creation but the Creator Him-

self.

Therefore, even though some “grave and rev-

erend signors” of philosophy present ‘ the ancient

idolatry of the earth and the elements in the dis-

guise of learning, or even though some of the poets

forget that they are writing poetry and would have

us imagine that their pantheistic expressions are a

veritable divine revelation, we must not be deceived.

Idolatry is idolatry whether offered in the jargon of

the primitive men of the mountains and the jungles

or in the profoundidion—sometimes so profound as
to be all but unintelligible—of some high reputed
philosopher. My common sense tells me that though

a poet or an artist, as we say, “puts himself into his

work”, the poem is not the poet, the art is not the

artist, the music is not the musician
;
and by the same

logic, creation is not the Creator. Seeking for

God we rest not in nature: we rise through Nature

to Nature’s God.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 2S

HUMANISM: MAN HIS OWN GOD
Address delivered on November 17, 1935

I hope we may presume, after the address of last

week, that Nature is no adequate substitute for

God. It is shameful to bend the knee to a sacred bull,

a holy snake, or a crocodile-god; and it is hardly

less repulsive to fall on one’s face and pray to a

mountain, a waterfall, a tree, a sunset, or to the sun

itself as if it could hear and pity and love and reply.

But is there not something in visible nature that

has a better claim to be divine, something sentient,

intelligent, something conscious of its own exist-

ence and of ours, something capable of sympathy,

pity, mercy, love, something in a word godlike?

What of human nature? What of man? Does

not the very juxtaposition of the two words “god-

like” “man” bring to mind that magnificent passage

of Shakespeare’s

:

“What a piece of work is a man

!

How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty

!

In form and moving how express and admirable

!

In action how like an angel! In apprehension

how like a god
!”

And, not to go back to the classics, do we not see

almost any day in current literature such a para-

graph as this which I have found on the editorial

page of the New York Times'.

“Man has searched out many of the things about

which the Voice in the Whirlwind mockingly in-

quires of Job. He has constructed mechanical

behemoths mightier than the monsters whose bones

were like tubes of brass and who counted iron as



26 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

straw. He has found his way to the dwelling of

light, quintillions of miles away. He has literally

walked in the recesses of the deep and has compre-

hended the breadth of the earth. He has entered the

treasure houses of snow and hail, and has become

acquainted with the father of the rain and the

mother of the ice. . •

“
‘Many wonders there be,’ sang the chorus in

the Antigone of Sophocles, ‘but naught more won-

drous than man.’ Yet this was because he had made

his way over ‘the surging sea,’ and had furrowed the

earth with his plow-share : because he had trapped

the light-witted birds and tamed the savage bull and

the shaggy rough-maned horse; because he had

learned speech and the ‘wind-swift speed of counsel

and civic wit.’. . .

“Far beyond these ancients have the moderns

gone. . . The scientist has constructed a telescope

that will give sight of innumerable stars never seen

before by inhabitants of our planet; he has dis-

covered ‘cosmic-rays’ which are as powerful in the

darkness as in the sunlight and which give infor-

mation of an elemental creation that is still going

on in outer space; he has perfected films and instru-

ments for giving voices to shadows and for making

television an everyday reality; he has developed

aviation to such an extent that fiying is no longer

looked upon as an adventure but as a method of

locomotion; he has prevented certain diseases from

becoming epidemic
;
he has lengthened the past by a

half billion years. • . he has generated a higher

potential of electricity than was ever before obtain

ed and has discovered that the earth is 47,000 light-

years from the centre of our universe-”



2?IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

Man has indeed, to an amazing degree, made him-

self master of this planet. And if he has made him-

self master of Nature, has he not won the right to be

thought of as Nature’s God? There have been some

who answered “Yes” to that question, and they have

not all been savages or imbeciles. In ancient Egypt

and Persia and Syria and India, and (when Oriental

thought had made its way westward, after western

arms had made their way eastward) man was

apotheosized. Nations and tribes and peoples

turned away from sticks and stones, from beasts and

stars, and worshipped Man, after first deifying him

and placing him upon a throne on high Olympus.

Indeed, so natural and so powerful was the impulse

to make a god of man that many religions degenera-

ted like Buddhism, which commenced with a noble

and lofty theology and fell into idolatry and man-

worship as soon as it got out of the hands of the

Gautama himself and came into contact with the

popular mind. Moses, as every Bible-reader re-

members, fearing that the people might adore him,

arranged before death to conceal forever the place

of his burial. Yes, there has been a tendency, and I

dare not call it an altogether ignoble tendency, upon

the part of man to make gods of his heroes.

Unfortunately not all who have been exalted to

the skies and given divine honor have been of the

hero type. Men have made gods of tyrants, mon-

sters, addicts of abominable and unnatural passion,

exemplars of inhuman cruelty. Edward Gibbon,

historian of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-

pire, always brilliant, always eloquent and almost

always reliable when not concerned with his hete

noire, Christianity, speaks of “The dark and un-



28 IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

relenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the stupid

Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly

Vitellius, the timid and inhuman Domitian” as Ro-

man emperors who he says, “are condemned to ever-

lasting infamy.”

Yes, condemned to everlasting infamy by the

Christian conscience which Gibbon so deeply de-

spised, but these monsters were one and all worship-

ped as gods under Greco-Roman paganism, the pas-

sing of which was so much lamented by Gibbon.

Julius Caesar was perhaps the first of the man-

made gods in Rome. There are those in present-

day Italy who still seem to consider him, if not as a

god, as the paragon of human excellence—those who
love to be photographed at the base of Caesar’s

statue and who look up to the effigy of the con-

queror with frank admiration, not to say adoration.

And indeed if military genius, an insatiable thirst

for conquest and the construction of a vast empire

by means of pitiless, remorseless bloodshed entitles

a man to be worshipped as God, Julius Caesar was

divine. But the fact remains tha he was murderous,

lecherous, a profligate and spendthrift, an extor-

tioner who again and again refilled his depleted

treasury—depleted because of his mad extravagan-
ces—with loot taken from innocent peoples. How
the ancient Romans, pagan though they were, could

call that man divine, build temples and altars to him,

burn incense and offer sacrificial victims to him,

is a puzzle and a scandal to the Christian con-

science. How any modern Roman who has inherited
from the days of St. Peter and St. Paul the pure

worship of Jesus Christ, can prefer Julius Caesar

is incomprehensible. Friedrich Nietzsche, of course.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 29

based an entire philosophy upon his preference for

the bloodthirsty Gothic gods over the gentle Naza-

rene. But Neitzsche, as all the world knows, was

mad. Shall we then solve our puzzle by supposing

that any modern who turns away from the God of

Peace and worships a conqueror god gives symp-

toms of madness?

From Julius Caesar, who was assassinated in the

year 44 B. C-, to the Emperor Diocletian, who died

in 313 A. D., there were 53 deifications ; 38 men de-

clared gods and 15 women, wives or relatives of em-

perors, declared goddesses.

Hadrian, though one of the best of the Roman

emperors, lived in unnatural intimacy with the boy

Antinous and when the youth in an excess of love

offered himself as a human sacrifice to Hadrian as

if Hadrian were a god, the emperor declared him a

god, erected statues and temples to him over all the

empire and commanded all men to adore him. When

Caesar was slain, a noble Roman senator took oath

that he saw the soul of Caesar ascend into a star. So

also after Antinous’ suicide, there were found as-

trologers to declare that he had been taken up to his

eternal abode in one of the stars of heaven, which

the emperor thereupon named with the name of his

beloved, departed, divine Antinous.

Nero, foul, vicious brute that he was, declared

himself a god, after the example of his father Domi-

tian who had been in the habit of signing imperial

documents, “Domitian Lord and God.” Nero’s

wife Poppaea also was declared divine. Wives were

often deified, mothers sometimes, mothers-in-law

never—as far as I know.
Caracalla, another of the line of monsters who



30 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

polluted the imperial throne in the days of Rome’s

decadence, killed his brother and when he saw his

mother weeping over the murdered boy, warned her

that if she didn’t suppress her sighs and stifle her

lamentations she too would be killed. This same

bloody tyrant being in Alexandria took a safe seat in

the balcony of a temple of Serapis and, from that

vantage point, directed, witnessed and flendishly en-

joyed the massacre of several thousand citizens. His

own time came, as it did to all these mad tyrants,

“They that take the sword shall perish by the

sword.” He was assassinated, but once the senate

and the army had got rid of him, either from super-

stition or from a sense of perverse irony, they de-

clared him a god and worshipped him.

Commodus, the son of the philosopher-emperor

Marcus Aurelius, was as unlike his father as Nero

was unlike his tutor Seneca. He had the strength

of a bull, the skill of a trained gladiator and the

ferocity of a tiger. He called himself Hercules, ap-

propriated the traditional costume of the giant-god,

club and lion skin, descended into the arena, killed

elephants, rhinoceroses, and men. Later he gave up

the character of Hercules and took to himself the

name of Paulus, a popular Secutor, a champion

swordsman who in that day enjoyed the idolatrous

admiration of the mob like a favorite toreador or

picador in modern Spain. Gibbons says that Corn-

modus aroused “the contempt and hatred of every

man of sense and virtue in the empire.” No doubt.

But none the less he was worshipped as God, alive

and dead.

Naturally in all this god-making and god-wor-

shipping there was a great deal of skepticism



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 31

mingled with the superstition. In Greece, the great

Demosthenes said: “If Alexander thinks himself

divine, the son of a god, let him by all means be the

son of two gods, Zeus, god of heaven and earth, and

Poseidon, god of the sea
!”

And since, as always happens, what we cal]

graft was associated with such religion, Mark An-

tony, the same who made the tearful speech over

Caesar’s dead body, the same who later lost his

chance to be emperor because he couldn’t tear him-

self away from the embrace of Cleopatra, when in

Athens, called himself Dionysus or Bacchus, god of

drunkenness, and demanded the dowry of Athene,

the goddess of the city whom he declared he would

take to wife.

We need not, however, go back to classical or
biblical times to find an example of the megalomania

that induces powerful persons to imagine themselves

God and to demand divine honors.

In Paris in 1793 the revolutionists dethroned

God and in His place inaugurated the worship of

Reason, personified in a prostitute. But six months

later Robespierre reestablished the worship not in-

deed of the One True God, but of what he was

pleased to call “The Supreme Being.” He burned

the statue of Atheism in the Champ de Mars and

replaced it with one of Wisdom- The tyrant himself

acted the part of supreme pontiff in an elaborate

religious ceremonial. But he couldn’t make the new

religion seem anything but ridiculous. The French

historian de Presseuse calls the ceremonies in honor

of Wisdom a “comic opera religon.” One of Robes-

pierre’s colleagues risked his head by exclaiming

“You weary us with your Supreme Being.” And



32 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

there were suspicions that what Robespierre was

really aiming at was the apotheosis of himself. But

instead of deification came decapitation. His head

rolled into the basket with those of other victims of

the guillotine. The Romans killed Caesar because

they thought he wanted to be king. The Parisians

killed Robespierre because they thought he might

perhaps imagine himself God. So it goes, Caesar,

Domitian, Nabuchodonosor, Antiochus, Epiphanes,

Robespierre.

Now I cannot but be aware that these instances

of the aberration of the religious instinct may be

seized upon by atheists as an argument in their

favor. Since such abominations are the product of

the tendency of man to deify nature or his fellow

man, some will say that the only wise conclusion is

to smother out the religious instinct altogether.

But to me the logic points in a different

direction. The horrible examples I have cited do not

tell against religion. They are a warning of the

danger of the perversion of religion, the conse-

quence of an attempt to frustrate the religious in-

stinct. Let us have a comparison. We often see the

ugly consequences of the perversion of love. The

love of man for woman, in itself, is beautiful, mys-

tical, sacred; but when thwarted, misdirected, cor-

rupted, it becomes obscene and perhaps murderous.

Any psychologist can tell you (you need no Sigmund

Freud) that a natural passion gone wrong becomes

unnatural. Ages before we began to babble of psy-

chology, all the race knew the maxim Corruptio

optimi pessima, “Spoil what is best and you have

what is worst.” The more sublime the good, the

more base the evil which is the perversion of the



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? S3

good. If, therefore, we are wise we shall not aim

to obliterate or annihilate love but to direct it, en-

noble it, sublimate it.

As of love, so of religion. It is woven into the

fibres of man’s heart. To tear it out would be a

crime if it were not an impossibility. There can be

but one rational conclusion therefore from the

dismal and tragic evidences of the perversion of re-

ligion, and in particular the perversion that takes

the form of the deification of man. Let man be con-

tent to be man- Don’t mock him by telling him that

he is what he knows he is not- You cannot really

deify him, but you may demoralize him. If he be-

lieves you, the belief will go to his head. That way

lies madness. The attempt to make a god of man

results neither in a man nor in a god but in a mon-

ster, like any other unnatural, grotesque, repulsive

hybrid. That, I think, is the conclusion forced upon

us by the Neros, the Caligulas, the Commoduses, and

the Caracallas. They are an historical demonstra-

tion of the futility of the attempt to put man where

he doesn’t belong, on a throne in heaven. We have
it from Divine Revelation that God became man,

but we need no revelation, we need only reason and

experience to teach us that man cannot become

God.



34 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

HEGELIANISM: THE STATE AS GOD

Address delivered on November 24, 1935

The statement made in the preceding discourses

of this series that man must have some kind of God,

and that if you deprive him of the True God he will

fashion to himself a false god, is not an arbitrary

declaration, but a conclusion from the experience of

the race; not a bookish opinion but a fact from

life, not a pious sentiment but an historical truth.

Turning from God, man has thought to find a sub-

stitute either in Nature or in himself (himself in the

concrete—^this man or that; or himself in the ab-
stract—Mankind). Both nature and humanity fail-
ing him, man has accepted the state in place of God,

and this is perhaps his most tragic religious blunder.

In the French Revolution, for example, Christ

was cast out, but the reds of that day, mad though

they were, knew they had to have a god of some

sort, so they made a god—or goddess—of La Patrie.
Raynal, an apostate abbe, declared “The state is not

made for religion
;
religion is made for the state. .

.

The state is supreme in all things. When the state

has spoken, the church has nothing to say.”

The new religion had its catechism, its bible, its

blessed sacrament, its altars, its priests, its liturgi-

cal worship, its ceremonial. Its catechism was the

Bill of the Rights of man, its bible was the Constitu-

tion, carried in procession by twelve old men, imita-

tion apostles, under a canopy like the Host in the

Monstrance on the feast of Corpus Christi. The

legislature decreed that “in all the communes an

altar shall be raised,” and instead of I. H. S. or I. N.

R. I. “there shall be engraved on every altar the in-



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 35

scription, ‘The citizen is born, lives and dies for La

Patrie,’
”
the State. Another apostate to the revolu-

tion, Malie-Joseph Chenier, declared: “The only

dogma of the new religion is Equality; in place of

preachers we have lawmakers, magistrates are pon-

tiffs
;
the human family burns its incense only at the

altar of La Patrie, common mother and divinity.”

There was prepared a ritual for civic baptism, civic

marriage, and civic burial. “The religion of the

state had its hymns and prayers, fasts and fes-

tivals.”
*

This attempt in France to substitute the State

for God was not by any means the first adventure

of the sort. A state religion which the citizen was
compelled to practise under penalty of death dates

as far back at least as Nabuchodonosor, 600 years

before Christ. In the Book of Daniel we have a pic-

turesque account of the command of the king that

all should worship as the state decreed, or die

:

“King Nabuchodonosor made a statue of gold, of

sixty cubits high and six cubits broad, and he set it

it up in the plain of Dura of the province of Baby-

lon.

“Then Nabuchodonosor the king sent to call to-

gether the nobles, the magistrates, and the judges,

the captains, the rulers, and governors, and all the

chief men of the provinces, to come to the dedica-

tion of the statue which king Nabuchodonosor had

set up. And they stood before the statue which king

Nabuchodonosor had set up.

“Then the nobles, the magistrates and the

judges, the captains and rulers, and the great men

that were placed in authority, and all the princes of

* C. J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism, p. 103.



36 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

the provinces, were gathered together to come to

the dedication of the statue, which king Nabucho-

donosor had set up.

“Then a herald cried with a strong voice: To

you it is commanded, 0 nations, tribes, and lan-

guages :

“That in the hour that you shall hear the sound

of the trumpet, and of the flute, and of the harp, of

the sackbut, and of the psaltery, and of the sym-

phony, and of all kind of music; ye fall down and

adore the golden statue which king Nabuchodonosor

hath set up.

“But if any man shall not fall down and adore,

he shall the same hour be cast into a furnace of

burning Are.”

Notice, I beg you, the statue is not said to have

been one of Baal or Astarthe, or Bel or the Dragon,

of Gog or Magog. The idol was Babylon, the State.

Refusal to bend the knee to the image of the State

was held to be treason and atheism—^both. The
children of Israel, Sidrach, Misach, and Abdenago,

were thrown into the flery furnace, not so much be-

cause they were faithful to Jehovah as because they

were nonconformists to the state religion. Up to

the moment of their refusal to worship the golden

statue they were the king’s favorites. The Scrip-

ture says : “. . . they stood in the king’s presence.

And in all matters of wisdom and understanding,

that the king inquired of them, he found ten times

better than all the diviners, and wise men, that

were in all his kingdom.” The king had admired

them, loved them, and protected them. But he, like

all his subjects, was bound by the laws of the Medes



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 37

and the Persians, the laws that may never be alter-

ed; and the first of those laws was that all should

worship the State-god. Travellers from other lands,

captives or sojourners in Babylon, might worship

their home gods, if they pleased, but worship the

national god they must.

So it was in Rome. To those who forget this

fact it must seem an anomaly that although every

god in the Empire and even the gods from beyond the

boundaries of the Empire found a welcome in Rome

and a shrine in the Pantheon, the worshippers of

Jesus Christ were threatened, judged, tortured,

driven under ground, dragged out, put to the sword,

burned alive, torn to pieces by wild beasts. Zeus,

Poseidon, Isis, Osiris, Baal, Astarthe, Diana, from

the east; and the multitudinous gods that the bar-

barians, coming to Rome first as captives and later

as conquerors brought with them from the west and

the north—all were welcome. When St. Paul arrived
in Athens, he saw statues to this god and to that

god, hundreds of them, and lest one be inadvertently

neglected, a statue to the unknown god. So he said,

“I see you are too religious.”

Like the Athenians, the Romans were not in-

tolerant of strange gods. It flattered their sense of

cosmopolitanism and their claim to philosophical

liberalism to welcome gods from everywhere.

Similarly today, in New York and Chicago and San

Francisco, you may bring along your Buddha, or

your Bab or your Krishna Murti, build him an altar

in your home, or a temple in a public street and

worship him with whatever fantastic rites you

please.

What then was the crime of the Christians in



38 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

pagan Rome? Not that they worshipped Jesus

Christ, but that they would not worship Caesar.

They were condemned, outlawed, persecuted,

butchered, because being in Rome they would not do

what the Romans did, worship the State as God.

Now it may seem that we in modern times have

universally got rid of such heathenish idolatry of the

State. But I am not sure. In Russia and Mexico

and to a slightly lesser degree in Germany and in

Italy the State has been declared supreme, and, to all

intents and purposes, divine. True, they do not

literally deify Stalin or Cardenas, nor do they place

Hitler and Mussolini on a pedestal, light candles and

burn incense before them. But none the less, in all

these countries the State is held to be preeminent,

paramount, absolute. Under modern dictators as

under the ancient Caesars, there is an alleged tolera-

tion. Russia and Mexico protest to the world that

they do not interfere with the practice of the Christ-

ian religion, or any other. In Germany and Italy

there is actually a concordat with the Church. But

let a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew under any

dictatorship declare that his religious convictions

prevent his accepting the State as supreme in all

things, and he will quickly discover the insignificance

of “legal” toleration. Whatever be your religion,

whoever be your god, you must bend the knee, pros-

trate yourself, heart and mind, body and soul before

the idol of State supremacy.

In ancient Babylon “the nobles, the magistrates

and the judges, the captains, the rulers” and all the

others in that long catalogue, as well as the people

had to bow down before the symbol of the State.

At the sound of the trumpet, the harp, the fiute.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 39

psaltery, down they went upon their faces to wor-

ship the golden image of Babylon.

Today in place of a visible golden idol there is an

invisible abstraction, the State; and in place of the

psaltery, the sackbut, the symphony, and the other

obsolete instruments, in the lands where dictators

rule, the press, the platform, too often the pulpit,

the radio, the legislature (dummy legislature if any

at all) echo the dictator’s command, “Down on your

knees before the principle of State supremacy

;

think as the State thinks, do what the State orders.

Conform, obey, submit your body and subject your

mind to the State. What the State declares to be

good is good—^what she calls evil is evil; the State
will decree right and wrong, true and false. Resist

and reject as treason any opinion contrary to the

policy of the State.”

In Russia priests had little chance to protest

against this monstrous idolatry, but if they did they

were promptly murdered, and if they did not, they

slowly starved..

In Mexico there was no priestly rebellion. The

hierarchy submitted a polite formal plea for justice

and right, but they were none the less driven into

exile; the clergy are still insulted, tortured, mur-

dered, and their numbers reduced to the vanishing

point.

In Germany, Catholic priests and the more loyal

type of Protestant ministers have declined to join

in the general fanatical adoration of the State Power

and have in consequence been compelled to endure a

teasing, aggravating, and not always unbloody, per-

secution.

In Rome the Pope, try as he would to be con-



40 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

ciliatory, was compelled to cry out, “We see a con-

cept of the State. . • which is not a Catholic con-

cept because it makes the State an end in itself and

the citizens mere means to that end, absorbing and

monopolizing everything.” Fascist authorities do

not disclaim the totalitarian state. The lately de-

ceased Signor Rocco, chief philosopher of the move-

ment, says : “Society is an end, individuals are the

means”; whatever liberty the individual has comes

to him not by nature, not from God, but “as a con-

cession of the State”—a flat contradiction of Catho-
lic doctrine. According to our theology it is blas-

phemy and idolatry to give to a creature the prero-

gatives of God. God and only God is the end of man.

Not the State, not the Church. State and Church

were made for man, not man for the Church or the

State. The Church has often been accused of arro-

gance but, though She holds in Her hands the keys

of eternal life, though She has the warrant of Christ

to speak in His name, She has never been guilty of

the madness of saying, “I am the end of man; for

me man was created, through me man has obtained

his inalienable right to the possession of his own

soul.” Only the State has made that mad claim.

The State that usurps the place of God and assumes

the prerogatives of God must consider itself equal

to God or superior to God, and this is the ultimate in

sacrilege.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 41

HEDONISM: THE RELIGION OF
PLEASURE

Address delivered on December 1, 1935

“The Religion of Pleasure” may be only a meta-

phor. PerhapflS no one consciously makes a god of

mere enjoyment, erects an altar to it, genuflects and

prostrates himself before the lust of the flesh, the

lust of the eye, and the pride of life, or before that

other earthly trinity, wine, woman, and song. How-

ever, it is a sad fact, sad and strange that some re-

ligious leaders, even in Christian times advocated

the pursuit of sensual pleasure as if it were a part

of divine worship. That fact, though, is not evidence

of the existence of a religion of pleasure.

There has been no such religion since Christ. In

ancient Greece, Aristippus of Cyrene taught a phil-

osophy of pleasure. Hedonism, according to which

pleasure is the chief good, the purpose and the end

of human life, the only fit occupation of a wise man.

Certain Romans, notably Epicurus, from whose

name of course come our words “epicure” and

“epicurean”, refined and developed the teachings of

Aristippus. The Poet Lucretius made it popular by

setting it before the people in excellent verse.

Horace in his odes not so systematically but perhaps

even more eifectively advised men to “Seize pleas-

uer e’er it flies”, meaning by pleasure such things as

decent Christians hold unspeakable.

Furthermore, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians,

Babylonians worshipped carnal passion deified in

Venus, Ariadne, Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite and other

variously named goddesses. In temples and groves

abominable orgies were held under the aegis of re-



42 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

ligion. Drunkenness too was deified in the person of

Dionysus or Bacchus. And there was the very

popular mythology of fauns and satyrs as an incen-

tive to lasciviousness.

But with the coming of Christ, as John Milton

writes

:

“Peor and Baalim,

Forsake their Temples dim,

With that twice-batter’d god of Palestine,

And mooned Ashtaroth, . . .

The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn.

In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz

mourn.

And sullen Moloch fled.

Hath left in shadows dread,

His burning Idol all of blackest hue.

In vain with Cymbals’ ring.

They call the grisly king.

In dismal dance about the furnace blue;

The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis haste.”

Since the descent of the obscene deities into the

eternal pit, there has been no official worship of sin

or vice or carnal pleasure. But even within the

borders of Christendom there are individuals, not a

few, who take pleasure if not as a religion at least in

place of a religion. I knew one man, an apostate

from Catholicism, a poet of rare genius, who said:

“Sacrament? Sin is my sacrament. I find religious

ecstasy in the act of sin”. But that poor fellow like

many another blessed—and cursed—^with genius was
mad, clean mad, and ended, as might bo anticipated.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 43

with suicide. Such abnormal instances apart, pleas-

ure is sought by those who have no religion as a re-

lief from the intolerable loneliness and weariness of

a heart that has been emptied of God. Deprived of

the only food that can satisfy the soul, they hunger

and thirst for they know not what; so with the

fierceness of a famished wolf they run hither and

thither, hoping to find something that can still the

interior craving. They do not succeed. It needs

no pious moralizing to tell them, for ten thousand

years of human history could teach them, if they

would listen, that man doth not live by bread alone,

that the eye is not filled with seeing nor the ear

with hearing; that hunger in the heart cannot be

appeased with meat and drink, nor the cravings of

the soul quieted by surrender to the passions of the

body.

Pleasure therefore would be a very inadequate

god. Also a very tyrannical god. It is like “the

horse leech which hath two daughters that say,

Bring, bring,” or like “hell and the mouth of the

womb which are never satisfied”, or like “The fire

which never saith, it is enough”.

Not even Moloch was as insatiable a deity as

pleasure. The hideous Phoenician god demanded

that youths and maidens, and infants snatched from

the breasts of their mothers, be fiung as a holocaust

into the arms of his iron statue, white hot upon a

fiery altar, and his priests ran in a frenzy amongst

the worshippers crying hysterically “More ! More
!”

But pleasure, especially carnal pleasure, is a crueler

Moloch than Moloch. It will burn a man up, devour

him flesh and blood and bones, and yet be unsatis-

fied. The devotee of pleasure may give body, mind,



44 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

heart, soul, good repute, honor, career, his prospects

here and hereafter, but he can no more propitiate

his relentless god than you could extinguish a fire by

feeding it fuel. Yes, many a cruel god has been in-

vented and adored by miserable man, but there is no

more terrible god than pleasure. Only a sadist, one

who revels in the pain of others, could preach that

religion; only a masochist, one who loves to inflict

pain upon himself, could practise it.

But whether or not we call it a religion, the pur-

suit of pleasure has been, to all appearances, the

principal object in the life of myriads of unfortunate

humans. A few of them, having the twin talents
found only in the creators of literature, the talent to

read their own heart and the talent to tell men what

they find inscribed on its fleshy tablets, have handed

down their experience in words of tragic eloquence.

St. Augustine is chief of them; his little book

The Confessions is a masterpiece of self-scrutiny as

well as a supreme specimen of imperishable literary

beauty. He describes the uneasiness, restlessness,

fretfulness of a soul that runs away from God and

thinks to find solace in sin:

“Whither do they fly when they fly from Thee

. . . Where was I myself when I was seeking

Thee?” Here, I venture to think, is particularly pro-

found psychological insight. He flees from God, yet

he seeks God. He seeks God, madly, in carnal de-

lights, in the embrace of a woman. This statement,

I cannot but recognize, will smack of sacrilege to the

innocent. But it is quite orthodox theology as well

as good psychology. All who sin in the flesh

(though they would laugh a ribald laugh if you told



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 45

them) are seeking in their sin what God alone can

give, and so, unconsciously they are seeking God.

In their heart as in the heart of the saint is implant-

ed a craving for infinite happiness. They think to

find it in the fierce joy of carnal commerce. The

craving that impels wise men to God drives the fool

to the foulest of pleasures. The consequence is

disillusion, and—unless they recoil from sin and
seek God—disgust, hatred of human life, pessimism,
cynicism.

This is the very theme of The Confessions of St.

Augustine. Out of the depths of his own disillu-

sioned soul, he cries to his fellow sinners: “Why

will ye still, still tread these steep and stony paths?

Ye are seeking for rest where no rest is to be found.

Seek what ye seek, but it is not where ye seek it.

Ye are seeking a happy life in the land of death. It

is not there!” And again, “Woe to the rash soul

which hopes by forsaking Thee, 0 God, to find some-

thing better. It tosses and turns upon back and side

and belly, but the bed is hard, and Thou alone art

rest.” He was not speaking out of some dry blood-

less manual of moral axioms; he was reading the

lesson off from a heart that had been torn with pas-

sion, the most urgent, imperious of all passions,

lust. “I was beloved”, he says. “I attained my

wfish, the bondage of clandestine fruition, and proud-

ly riveted round myself the chain of woe: then was

I scourged with red hot iron rods”.

A very wise student of The Confessions, Charles
Bigg, in an illuminating introduction to the little

masterpiece says “Experience is always the same”,

and he quotes the Roman poet Lucretius “Medio de



46 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT ?

fonte leporum surgitamari aliquid”, which Lord

Byron in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage translates

:

"Still from the fount of joy’s delicious springs

Some bitter o’er the flowers its bubbling venom

flings.”

Byron, of all men, had reason to know. If ever

there was a profligate, a renegade from virtue, a

rebel against religion, an enthusiastic devotee of

licentiousness, it was the handsome, talented, Eng-

lish nobleman who has painted for us his own por-

trait and written his own life in Childe Harold and

Don Juan. Childe Harold is a kind of Ulysses "al-

ways roaming with a hungry heart”, except that

Ulysses roamed in search of adventure, whereas

Childe Harold, that is to say Lord Byron, wandered

over a continent seeking joy in carnal pleasures.

Did he find it? Listen:

"And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart.

And from his fellow-bachanals would flee;

Apart he stalked in joyless revery.

And from his native land resolved to go

And visit scorching climes beyond the sea.

With pleasure drugged he almost longed for woe.

And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades

below.”

But in vain did he travel, for

"What exile from himself can flee ?

To zones, though more and more remote.

Still, still pursues, where’er I be.

The blight of life—the demon Thought.

Through many a clime ’tis mine to go.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 47

With many a retrospection cursed

;

And all my solace is to know,

Whate’er betides, I’ve known the worst.

What is that worst? Nay do not ask

—

In pity from the search forbear

:

Smile on—nor venture to unmask
Man’s heart, and view the HELL that’s there.”

Byron was also his own Don Juan, who in conse-

quence of his amatory escapades becomes a misan-

thrope, hater of mankind. Byron suffers, as one

critic has said “the anguish of a baffled will”, or as

he himself puts it “the passion of a bleeding heart.”

So! they don’t come off very well, these eager

votaries of pleasure. They turn from God, they

barter their soul like Faust to the devil in exchange

for what they might have had free from God, in-

terior joy, and if they had the genius of the saints,

ecstasy, even here below, such ecstasy as belongs of

right to the blessed who enjoy the beatific vision.

They blunder, for they imagine that the life of

religion is dull and drab. With Swinburne, another

lascivious pagan, they complain that the world has

grown gray with the breath of the “pale Galilean”.

They want no gray world, but a scarlet world. The

contentment of good simple people they scorn as in-

sufficient. They must have a riot, an orgy, an ec-

stasy of joy. So they fare forth on their Don Juan

adventures. And presently their mouth is filled with

ashes, their heart and soul with bitter poison.

Augustine could have told them ; “Seek what ye

seek, but it is not where ye seek it”, and again “I

attained my wish, clandestine fruition, but I was

scourged with red hot iron rods”. And long before



48 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

Augustine, Solomon had given the warning. He

speaks indeed of the harlot but the goddess of pleas-

ure is a harlot. “Her lips”, he says, “are like a

honeycomb dripping, and her throat is smoother

than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood and

sharp as a two edged sword. Her feet go down into

death and her steps go in as far as hell.” And

again he speaks as one who has had experience, “We

wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity. . . and

have walked through hard ways.”

Such is the history of the pursuit of pleasure.

The outcome is always the same
;
out of the heart of

the fountain of joy comes poison. The flowers at

the rim of the pool Fleurs du Mai.

Curiously the famous phrase of St. Augustine

explaining why man cannot be happy in sin, “Thou

hast made us for Thyself, 0 God, and our heart is

restless until it finds rest in Thee”, is found in

slightly different form in a man of much less talent,

Jean Jacques Rousseau. He too had gone deep intc

the mire of impurity. He confesses his sin, but he

seems to do so with apparent insincerity. But he

does say in all earnestness to a lady : “This internal

void of which you complain is never felt but in

hearts made to be filled
;
contracted hearts are never

conscious of a vacuum, because they are always full

of nothings; while, on the contrary, there are some

so craving, that they can never be satisfied by the

miserable being surrounding them. If nature has

made you the rare and fatal gift of a heart too sen-

sitive to the necessity of happiness, seek nothing out

of it
;
it must feed upon its own substance. . . That

moral sense, so rare among men; that exquisite

feeling of the beautiful, the true, and the just, which



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 49

always reacts upon ourselves, holds the soul, so en-

dowed in a continual state of rapture, which is the

most delightful of enjoyments.”

In that passage, a noble piece of thought and ex-

pression, Rousseau makes one mistake. He tells the

lady to turn within to her own heart, rather than to

outsiders. That indeed may be wisdom. But he

says also that her heart “must feed upon its own

substance”. If she attempts to put that advice into

practice, she will, as we say, “eat her own heart

out.”

No the better psychologist and the wiser director

of souls is Augustine. Revolting from carnal pleas-

ure as only a mockery and a torture, the saint turns

not to himself; he knew himself too well to think

that he could find comfort in his own heart, but to

God the Infinite. True, to find God, he looked within.

Seeking in his own soul and finding God, he turned

from base pleasure and found not only solace but

ecstatic joy in the possesssion of God. In his happi-

ness he cries out, “0 Lord, Thou hast burst my

bonds in sunder
; to Thee will I offer the sacrifice of

praise. Let my heart and my tongue praise Thee

and let all my bones say, ‘O Lord, who is like unto

Thee?’ Let them speak and do Thou answer, ‘I am

thy salvation’. . . 0 Christ Jesus, my Helper and

my Redeemer! How sweet did it seem to me in a

moment to taste no more the sweetness of folly; it

was joy to cast away what I had feared to lose. For

Thou didst cast it out. Thou true and sovereign

sweetness. Thou didst cast it out and fill its place.

Thou art sweeter than any pleasure, though not to

flesh and blood
;
brighter than any light, though hid-

den behind the inmost veil ; exalted above all honour,



50 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

though not to them that are exalted in their own

eyes. Henceforth my soul was delivered from the

gnawing anxieties of ambition and gain, from

wallowing in the mud and scratching the swinish

itch of lust; and I prattled like a child to Thee, O

lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, my Salvation.”

There is the religion of joy as far above the relig-

ion of pleasure as the heavens are above the earth,

as the shining stars are above the morass or the

hog-wallow of sin in which foolish men think to find

delight.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 51

AESTHETICISM: THE RELIGION OF
ART AND MUSIC

Address delivered on December 8, 1935

Just about twenty-five years ago there came

from the press a little volume with the fascinating

title Comfort Found in Good Old Books. The author,

George Hamlin Fitch, had suffered great bereave-

ment in the loss of his son. The young fellow had

been all in all to his father. When he was taken

away with shocking suddenness, it seemed to Mr.

Fitch that “the keystone of the arch of his life had

fallen and that everything lay heaped in ugly ruin”.

All the things he had hitherto valued had now little

or no worth. In his grief he turned for consolation

to his books, especially to the classics. And he

wrote “those old favorites of all ages can still be-

guile me, though my head is bowed in the dust with
grief and my heart is as sore as an open wound
touched by a careless hand”.

It is evident therefore from the experience of

this good man, and I dare say of many thousands

similarly stricken and similarly comforted, that

literature can be in its own way and its own meas-
ure “a very present help in time of trouble”. But

can it be an adequate substitute for God? Can the

cultivation of literature or for that matter of art

or music be a religion? The sorrowing father who
opens his heart to us, in that little book, confesses

no particular religious belief. He does not say
whether he had faith in God, or any lively sense of
the presence of God. He does indeed call the Bible
the first of the great books in which he found conso-
lation. Out of his own experience he promises



62 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

others that the reading of the Bible will, as he says,

“gradually transmute your spirit into something

which the worst blows of fate can neither bend nor

break”. The same assurance comes to us from a

very different type of man, indeed one of the most

enigmatical and contradictory of human beings,

John Cowper Powys who, though I don’t know and

he himself seems not to know if he has any faith

in God, selects the Bible as the first in his list of the

Hundred Greatest Books and says specifically that

the Psalms of David are “the most pathetic and

poignant as well as the most noble and dignified of

all poetic literature” and that “the rarest spirits of

our race will always return to them at every epoch

in their lives for consolation, for support and for

repose”.

Yet another man of a spirit more akin to that of

Mr. Fitch than that of Mr. Powys, Rowland Proth-

ero, in a book in which I myself have found great

illumination. The Psalms in Human Life, says : “The

Psalms are a mirror in which each man sees the

motions of his own soul. They express in exquisite

words the kinship which every thoughtful human

heart craves to find with a supreme, unchanging,

loving God, who will be to him a protector, guar-

dian, and friend. They utter the ordinary experi-

ences, the familiar thoughts of men; but they give

to these a width of range, an intensity, a depth, and

an elevation which transcend the capacity of the

most gifted. They translate into speech the spiri-

tual passion of the loftiest genius; they also utter,

with the beauty born of truth and simplicity, and

with exact agreement between the feeling and the

expression, the inarticulate and humble longings of



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 53

the unlettered peasant. So it is that, in every coun-

try, the language of the Psalms has become part of

the daily life of nations, passing into their proverbs,

mingling with their conversation, and used at every

critical stage of existence.”

To Prothero the Bible is an inspiration and a

consolation because it helps us to communicate with

“the supreme unchanging living God”. To Fitch it

seems to be rather a comfort in itself, and to Powys,

as I judge from his other books, the Bible is a beau-

tiful literature “pathetic and poignant”, noble and

beautiful and as such is a joy forever, God or no

God.

As with literature so with art and music. I

dare say that many a man who says no prayers, sub-

scribes to no creed, and freauents no church, turns

for spiritual soothing or stimulus to some master-

work of painting or sculpture, be it, according to

his taste, a Raphael Madonna or the Venus de

Medici, the Pieta of Michelangelo, or the Perseus

of Benvenuto Cellini, or some classic fragment of

the great Phidias.

Again some who ignore God or neglect Him and

who see in our sublimest liturgy nothing but mum-

mery, turn to music for the gratification of their

spiritual instincts. They lose themselves in an ec-

tasy of joy and wonder and apparent adoration at

a soul-stirring symphony. I am not surprised at

this substitution of music in place of religion nor do

I profess to be shocked. Though the veriest ama-

teur, less than a tyro in the scientific understanding

of music, I can feel its hypnotic power. Stepping

into a concert hall from a noisy tumultuous city



64 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

street, I can be quickly transported into another

world, a world of silence like that of which St.

Augustine speaks : a world in which “the tumult of

the flesh is hushed, hushed these shadows of earth,

sea, sky, hushed the heavens and the soul itself, so

that it passes beyond itself and does not think of

itself : all dreams are hushed and all sensuous reve-

lations and every tongue and every symbol”. For

music, high music, divine music, though it commence

with symbols and sensuous revelations, carries the

hearer into a world beyond that of sound and sym-

bol, and all sense impression.

The sensitive listener to a noble concerto or to

some gorgeous symphonic poem may appear to be

rivetting his gaze upon the conductor gesticulating

on the podium and to the orchestra under his baton,

yet he really sees nothing; he is dimly aware of a

certain agitation amongst the strings, the wood-

winds, and the brasses, but he doesn’t really hear

them. His spirit has gone floating away on the

wings of sound
;

his senses undergo a kind of

hypnosis. If you could be guilty of the profanation

of gazing intently upon the face of a worshipful

music-lover in the moment of his ecstasy, you would

come to realize that he is unaware of his surround-

ings : his real self is not there beside you, but away

in some realm of dreams and visions, some world

wherein is shining the light that never was on sea or

land. In a word he is transported: if you touch

him he comes back to himself and to earth like a

somnambulist suddenly startled awake, and when

he finds voice he may repeat with no intention of

sacrilege St. Paul’s enigmatical utterance, “I know

a man. . . (whether in the body, I know not, or



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 55 ,

out of the body, I know not. . .), such a one caught

up in the third heaven”.

When in the midst of some two or three thous-

and music lovers gathered for a recital by a master

of the violin, or for a concert by a band of virtuosi,

as one European critic has called the best of our

American orchestras, I have recognized upon their

faces as the music was about to begin the spirituali-

zing effect even of anticipated joy; I have felt the

hush that falls upon a great audience at that ex-

pectant moment, the quiet that takes possession of

otherwise restless persons; I have understood that

not only the senses but the soul within these people

has been stilled, and their heart enthralled with pure

delight
;
and I have said to myself, “This is their re-

ligion, this their temple of worship. Perhaps music

is their god, the only god that many of them ack-

nowledge; perhaps the trance into which they are

cast is their prayer of quiet, their mystical experi-

ence, their divine rapture”.

So too with art. It would be absurd to attempt

to define or to describe a genuine masterpiece of

painting. One critic of international reputation

being asked, in court, on the witness stand, under

oath, to explain how he could know an “old master”

from a copy or a counterfeit, confessed that he

didn’t know of any rule except to live in the house

with it for six months. Let us go further and say

that we do not feel certain that any given painting

is a true master work until we have lived with it

and looked at it for say some three or four or five

hundred years. If what John Cowper Powys says

of the Psalms may be said of a painting: “the

rarest spirits of our race will always return to them



66 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

at every epoch. . . for consolation, for support and

for repose”, we may safely consider that painting an

everlasting masterpiece.

But apart from a test that requires centuries, 1

suppose we may say that a painting is not great if

you see in it, I mean to say if the practised sensitive

eye sees in it, only what is on the canvas—color,
form, composition, the likeness of some person, the

representation of some landscape, or the graphic

record of some event, some historical happening.

That is not art. An image on the retina of the eye

or an impression on a photographic film is not art.

Art is not reproduction. Art is revelation. If a

painting shows only what is there, it is not art. Art

like fine music or high literature must carry the be-

holder beyond this world and all that appears in it,

transport him to the shores of the eternal world

and enable him to see and to hear things not given

to the tongue of man to utter.

One of the young undergraduates of Oxford who

had attended the sermons of John Henry Newman

in St. Mary’s, said in after years, “he revealed our-

selves to ourselves and the revelation startled us”.

That is to say, the sermons were art. If the stu-

dents had heard only words, seen only a man in a

pulpit, if only their ears were captivated by the

sweet music that flowed from that eloquent mouth,

if their minds rested in the thought drawn from the

well spring of that deep rich intellect, the sermons

would not have been art or, as we have them now on

the printed page, literature. Later when Newman

was made cardinal, he chose for the motto on his

coat of arms “Cor ad cor loquitur”

,

“Heart speaketh

unto heart”, and I believe these words are graven



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 57

on his tombstone. He intended them, I am sure, as

a description of intimate personal religion : the

heart of man in prayer speaketh to the heart of God,

with words or without words, indeed as all the

saints tell us better without words than with words.

But I venture to suggest that Newman’s motto, to-

gether with that of the psalmist, “deep calleth unto

deep”, is a key to great art and literature and music

as well as to religion. A master-genius somehow
tears an emotion or a vision of beauty out of the

depths of his own heart and by some incompre-

hensible magic contrives to project a personal spiri-

tual experience from his soul into ours. Written

words, musical notes, the painted canvas, the scul-

ptured marble, the musical instrument, even though

that instrument be the human voice, are only a

medium through which an intangible, invisible, im-

ponderable, immaterial soul-experience passed from

one man to another. When once the soul of the one

who sees the painting or hears the music has been

awakened and becomes active, there is no more need

of eye or ear, of canvas or. printed page, or stone or

bronze, or strings or drums or brasses. The soul is

away out of the body on a quest of its own in a world

that eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor the mind of

man conceived.

Now, therefore, if this be art, isn’t it remarkably

like religion? Isn’t it identical with religion? Like

religion? Yes! So like religion, so closely akin to

religion that the Catholic Church has always used

art and music and sculpture and architecture and

literature as sacramentals
;
that is to say, instru-

mentalities for the production of high and holy

thought, steps that lead like Jacob’s ladder up to



68 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

heaven, a help to him who would leave this sordid

world behind him and commune with God “out be-

yond the shining of the farthest star”.

To such an extent has the Catholic Church en-

couraged art of all kinds an an adjunct to religion

that it has been said even by those who are not

themselves Catholics that all great art is Catholic

and that without the Catholic faith there can be no

great art. Arthur Machen, for example, in Heiro-

glyphics has written : “Literature is the expression,

through the aesthetic medium of words, of the dog-

mas of the Catholic Church, and that which in any

way is out of harmony with these dogmas is not

literature. . . unless you have assimilated the final

dogmas. . . the eternal truths, you can never write

literature. Catholic dogma is merely the witness,

under a special symbolism, of the enduring facts of

human nature and the universe; it is merely the

voice which tells us distinctly that a man is not the

creature of the drawing room and the Stock Ex-

change, but a lonely awful soul confronted by the

Source of all Souls. . . to make literature it is

necessary to be, at all events subconsciously. Catho-

lic.” Perhaps Thomas Carlyle had all that in mind

when he said that the Elizabethan era, the golden

age of English literature, is “attributable to the

Catholicism of the Middle Ages”. One anonymous

commentator upon that text remarks that the

Catholic Religion was abolished as far as Parlia-

ment could abolish it before Shakespeare, but that

if all traces of Catholicism were blotted out, its in-

fiuences and ideas, its customs and practices, there

could have been no Shakespeare.

As of Shakespeare so of John Sebastian Bach.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 59

His Chef A’oeuvre is the Mass in B Minor. And a

metropolitan critic, Pitts Sanborn, speaking with

unrestrained enthusiasm of that Mass, declares that

its only counterpart in painting would be one of the

supreme masterpieces in the Salon Carre at the

Louvre and that even there its “illimitability would

be cramped”. He goes on to say: “It is rather to

the cathedrals of Chartres, of Bourges, of Amiens

that one must look for the true analogy, with their

soaring Gothic inexhaustibility and the uncabined

universe as their background. . . This Mass in B

Minor transcends the ordinary confines of human

endeavor until, though the suffering and the hope of

^ humanity are its theme, it suggests less the work of
a man than some divine homiletic pronounced from

on High for man’s comfort and salvation.”

Now be it noted: these masterpieces in the

Louvre, these cathedrals, and this superb Mass in B

Minor are Catholic. The Church has created or fos-

tered, appropriated, developed, purified, ennobled,

sanctified literature, music, and art—has made them
Her own.

Well then, why are not the arts a good substitute

for religion? The answer need hardly be given. It

is too obvious. Unless there be Ultimate Keality,

that is to say God, behind the surface beauty of a

painting or a poem, inside—so to speak—^the sculp-
tured bronze or marble, if there be nothing beyond

the bounds of this world, if when the soul seems

carried away in rapture it actually remains fastened

to this dull earth, if in fact there is no soul and no

eternal world, then all art and literature and music

are illusion. The first fine careless rapture of the

genius is a trick of his imagination, and all men and



60 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT ?

women who have been carried aloft on the wings of

poetic or artistic inspiration are destined to fall

back to earth wounded and bewildered. If man

striving with might and main to release himself by

means of the arts from the miseries of this poor

planet, soaring aloft on the wings of inspiration,

finds when he pierces the empyrean that the object

of his quest and his sublime adventure is not there,

that the flamantia moenia mimdi, the fiery battle-

ments of the world in the sky are only a mirage and

that beyond the mirage there is no home of Im-

perishable Beauty, no abode of Infinite Truth, then

indeed the artist, the poet, the music maker are the

most deluded of men, the most miserable of mortals.

All art that uplifts and inspires and thrills, all

beauty that catches the breath and stops the heart

—

all is mockery if there be no Supreme Beauty be-

yond this heavy dreary world of matter and force.

If the poet and all other makers of music, either the

insubstantial music that is wafted away on the air,

or the imperishable music caught and held forever

in the soaring columns or in the miraculous medi-

aeval glass of a Gothic cathedral
;
I say if all art and

music and literature exalt the soul only to cast it

down again, it were better that art and music and

literature had never been born.

For the ultimate purpose of all aesthetic striv-

ing is not merely to play with the imagination but

to reach out and touch Reality, to lay hold upon

God and to experience the ecstasy of the Divine

Embrace. This is religion, this is mysticism, and

this too is the purpose of art. Art therefore without

God would be an unthinkably cruel illusion. Art

with God is a companion and a fellow-adventurer



IF NOT CHEISTIANITY, WHAT? 61

with faith: Art is no substitute for Eeligion, but

an aspect, a phase, a help to Religion.

5
"



62 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

DETERMINISM: SUBMISSION TO FATE

Address delivered on December 15, 1935

Some weeks ago an American novelist, known

for his choice of sordid themes and the coarse real-

ism of his style, Theodore Dreiser, made the point-

blank statement that man is a machine and nothing

more. The notion is not new. Others have offered

a mechanistic interpretation of human life. Those

others, however, were largely professorial persons,

psychologists or biologists. They had not the ear of

the people. But by some strange quirk of the pop-

ular mind, when a writer of fiction with a flair for

the obscene snatches a sensational theory from the

atmosphere of the class room and flings it out into

the big world, the theory takes on an importance

that the pedagogues cannot give it. Where John B.

Watson or Ivan Pavlov slay their thousands, Theo-

dore Dreiser slays his tens of thousands.

The mechanistic theory, whether academic or

popular, is not important in itself. But it is signifi-

cant as an indication of an ever increasing contempt

for poor human nature. A generation or two ago
our Christian forbears were shocked at the Dar-

winian doctrine that man is an animal and nothing

more. But now after some seventy years, we are

asked to believe that man isn’t even an animal but

a mere machine. It would seem to have been de-

grading enough to be called a brute, kin to the

baboon and the gorilla and through some still miss-

ing link related in the collateral if not the direct

line to the tiger, the wolf, the hyena, the wart hog,

and other ferocious or repulsive beasts. But certain

“advanced” thinkers have of late said worse things



IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 63

than that about us. They pass the word to the sensa-

tion-seeking professional writers who in turn broad-

cast it to all who can read that man is too low in the

scale of being to be dignified with the name “ani-

mal”. It reminds me of a side remark made by the

late lamented 0. Henry, who comments upon the

name of one of the characters he had himself created

and nicknamed “Piggy”. When this fellow was

called “Piggy”, says 0. Henry, “a foul aspersion was

cast upon the noble family of swine”. So it seems

^ that when Darwin called man a mere animal, he
slandered the brute creation and paid human nature

too much honor. Man, it seems is, after all, not a

living, moving, breathing organism, self-contained

and self-directing
;
he is only a piece of machinery.

Alas, poor human nature! We are slipping rapidly

down in the scale of creation. Once man, then ani-

mal, now machine

!

Somehow (as perhaps the tone of these remarks

betrays) I am not really impressed with the opinions

of these self-constituted calumniators of human

nature. In fact they seem funny to me. Years ago

when in Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe I

read the sentence, “Man who thought himself a child

of God turns out to be only a placental mammal of no

more importance than a bacillus or a microscopic

infusorium”, I confess I was amused rather than

shocked or scandalized. I could think of nothing

but Daniel O’Connell’s famous encounter with the

Dublin fishwife who had great local fame as a ter-

magant. No one of her cronies dared swap Billings-

gate with her. But along came O’Connell and quite

overwhelmed the old dame with a vocabulary of

epithets such as she had never heard before. “You



64 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

miserable rhomboid”, he shouted. “You shameless

hypotenuse! Every one knows that you keep a

parallelogram in your house”, and he continued

pouring forth a flood of geometrical words until the

voluble old woman for once lost her tongue and stood

bewildered.

Now I dare say that Haeckel, who wrote for the

ignorant mob that reads what is called “popular

science”, knew he could bowl them over with a bar-

rage of biological terms. But those of us who do a

bit of thinking on our own account are not embar-

rassed. We are wise enough to see that behind a
smoke screen of ridicule and contempt Haeckel re-

tires without having explained the essential differ-

ence between man and any other placental mammal.

We know that man is a mammal (the word placental

is thrown in to impress the ignorant), and we know

that the ape is a mammal. In that respect man and

the ape are alike. But you don’t explain man when

you affirm his likeness to the animal world. If you

are going to account for him you have to explain

his unlikeness to the beasts. As one excellent

writer, Andrew M. Fairbairn, has said very

shrewdly

:

“The man-like ape, as far as history is concern-

ed, is an older being than man
;
he can boast a more

venerable ancestry; he is a more ancient inhabitant

of our planet, and has had, therefore, a longer

course of time in which to develop the resources that

are in him and achieve his man-like apehood. But

he stands today precisely where his most ancient

ancestor stood
;
he cracks his nuts and feeds himself

in the ancestral manner
;
he practises the old aboreal

architecture; he lives in the old home in the old



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 65

way, swings himself from tree to tree by the same

organ and with the same dexterity
;
he emits sounds

of alarm or ferocity or affection, cries of defiance or

of solicitation, which men may try to imitate but

can only understand by ceasing as much as possible

to be men and becoming apes. In a word, he began

as a brute and a brute he remains.”

So, the problem is not how is man linked with the

ape, but how did man break away from the ape?

For after all, if the two are alike they are also much

more unlike. What makes man are these unlike-

nesses. Apes, for example, do not build Gothic cath-

edrals or Taj Mahals or Alhambras or even Pyra-

mids. Apes do not compose and produce Shakes-

pearean drama, or Wagnerian opera. Apes do not

write Shelleyan Odes to a Skylark, or paint Raphael

Madonnas. And most of all, apes do not build them-

selves a noble religion. As I have said, the crucial

question is not where did man begin, but where has

he arrived. As Principal Fairbairn says further on

in the same passage:

“Man may have started on his new career as a

being with a capacity for religion, one who feared

powers invisible impersonated in a blasted tree, a

rude stone, a whitened bone, or a running stream,

but he has not stood fixed in that rude faith. . .

he has come to think of a God majestic, sole, holy,

ineffable, who inhabiteth eternity.”

Now, when you start in to explain the progress

of man while the ape has stood still, you can’t go far

without finding an essential difference between the

two. The essential difference is reason and will, and

reason and will point to a specifically human soul.

So in his popular manual of materialistic evolu-



66 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

tion, with the catchy title, The Riddle of the Uni-

verse, Haeckel leaves the principal riddle of the

universe, man, unexplained. There is no key in the

epithet “placental mammal”. A whale is a mammal
and so is a walrus and so is a cow and so are some

ten thousand other species, but not any one of them

or all of them have produced a school or a legislature

or an ethical code or a religion, or for that matter

one single poem or song or play. Unless you ex-

plain how man has done these things you have con-

tributed nothing to the solution of the riddle. Nor

will the added epithets “bacillus” or “infusorium”

help the matter. They only accentuate the mystery

and provide a more bewildering puzzle. I am afraid

we shall have to await another “Key to the Riddle”,

and it will be no key unless it tells us how the bacil-

lus grew to be Shakespeare, how the infusorium de-

veloped into a Dante or a Demosthenes or an

Isaias.

I have delayed upon the futility of materialistic

evolution, but I have not forgotten that our immedi-

ate question is not man the animal but man the

machine. The one argument will do for both. The

answer to Dreiser and all other “mechanists” is the

same as to Haeckel and all other materialists. If

you cannot explain man by calling him a beast, you

certainly cannot explain him by calling him a mach-

ine. In fact if you call him a mere machine you get

into a frightful maze of impossibilities and incredi-

bilities. If, for example, man is a machine, all

men, having the same anatomical and physiological

makeup are simply replicas of the same machine.

As far as physical contruction is concerned, we are

as much alike as two Fords or two hundred million



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 67

Fords. Even if you say that one man is made like a

Ford, another like a Lincoln, another like a Cadillac,

another like a Rolls-Royce, it still remains true that

every man is as much like every other man as every

automobile is like every other automobile. But if

we are all machines and hence all alike, how is it

that one human machine produces Hamlet or Mac-

beth, the Divina Comedia or Paradise Lost or the

Ninth Symphony, while another cannot so much as

string together a line or two of good grammatical

prose, or conceive, not to say compose, the slightest

phrase of melody or harmony. Once you admit a

non-mechanical spiritual element in man, person-

ality, soul, or that intangible something called

genius, you will have the key to your riddle. If you

persist in thinking that man is only so much bone

and muscle and sinew, a few ounces of this, a few

pounds of that and such and such a percentage of

horse power, you will never explain personality;

and unless you tackle that mystery you don’t even

approach the problem of man.

Furthermore, no automobile is any good (except

as an alluring exhibit in a show window) until man

gets in, puts his hands on the wheel and his foot on

the accelerator. The machine may be complete with

chassis and engine and magneto and all its hundred

other components, but until it feels the magic touch

of the human hand guided by the human brain, the

car might as well be so much useless junk. Man is

not the machine. Man makes the machine, directs

the machine, makes use of the machine as a kind of

extension of his hands, his arms, his feet, his legs,

an adjunct to his entire physical self.

I have indeed read of a machine, a weird and



68 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

wonderful mechanical robot that walks the streets,

turns corners, shakes hands, answers questions,

pulls out a watch and tells time. But of course it

isn’t the machine that does all this; it’s the man

behind the machine, the man that invented and

manufactured the robot. And I have heard of an

aeroplane sent out for a short cruise over the ocean

with neither pilot nor mechanic. But let there be no

misunderstanding, the brain of a man, the mind of

a man, the will of a man, was somewhere directing

that plane. If the day ever comes when a number of

passengers shall step into a plane, take their seats,

give the word “all ready” and some one shall touch a

button somewhere and the plane rise of itself, fly

a thousand miles and returnwith never a hand on the

stick, the exploit will be a triumph not for the steel

and canvas of which the plane is made, but for some

keen human brain. We shall not congratulate the

machine but the mind that visualized and created

the machine. Some history-making planes have

been placed in museums, but those who go to gaze

upon these interesting relics must realize that the

real marvel is Wilbur and Orville Wright, or Charles

Lndbergh or Wiley Post. The machine is only a

machine, the miracle is man.

Now I know this is all so elementary as to be

silly, but what else can you say but something ele-

mentary when an atheist who happens to have in-

fluence with a portion of the public comes out with

the statement that man is a machine and nothing

more? “Answer a fool according to his folly”, says

the Scripture, and so I suppose we have to answer a

simpleton with something a simpleton can grasp.

But there is a much more important conse-



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 69

quence of the idea that man is a machine. The notion

is not only absurd but immoral. In fact if man is

only a machine there is no such thing as morals.

That too is A. B. C., though certain advocates of a

mechanistic psychology still talk of “ethics” and

“morals”. Obviously a machine can have no morals.

If a buzz-saw cuts off a man’s hand, you don’t penal-

ize the buzz-saw. If a guillotine drops unexpectedly

and chops off the head of the executioner instead of

the head of the criminal, you don’t throw the guillo-

tine into jail or give it forty stripes on the bare

back. You don’t erect a second guillotine to execute

the first guillotine.

Similarly, if man is a machine you must not

blame him, no matter what horrible thing he may

do; and you must not praise him, no matter what

heroic or magnificent act he may perform. If he

deliberately plans a murder, and when the chance

comes commits the crime as planned, you must not

say “The villain !” If another man at the risk of his

life, or at the cost of his life rescues some fellow

man, you musn’t say “fine work, old man!”. If, as

your Theodore Dreisers and your John B. Watsons

tell us, man is a machine, physically compelled to do

whatever he does, then the hero is the same as the

villain, the villain the same as the hero, or rather

there is no hero and no villain. Under a mechanistic

or behavioristic psychology, good is bad, bad is

good; there is no good or bad. The murderer and

the martyr are equally worthy of praise or of blame,

or equally unworthy, as you please. Benedict Ar-

nold is just as much a hero as George Washington.

Statues should be erected to Wilkes Booth as well as

to Abraham Lincoln. Booth was a machine, no



70 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY. WHAT?

more responsible than a locomotive that runs over

a grasshopper, Lincoln was a machine no more noble

than a plough or a clock or a spinning wheel. Aaron

Burr fired the bullet that killed Alexander Hamilton,

but Aaron Burr was no more to blame than the

bullet. The insidious schemer who comes into your

home as a guest, sits at your table and takes advan-

tage of your hospitality to corrupt your wife or

betray your daughter has done no wrong. Take his

hand in yours. Call him friend. Ask him again to

your table and beg him again to accept the hospital-

ity of your roof. He is a good fellow. As good as

any other fellow. No one is good, or bad. He is a

machine. You are a machine. Your wife and your

daughter are machines. And shall one machine im-

pute blame to another? Shall the buzz-saw say to

the guillotine, “How can you be so cruel?”

In Eugene O’Neill’s play Dynamo the morbid and

fanatical hero looks upon the machine as a god, talks

to it and makes prayer to it, but when he sticks his

hand in the dynamo it tears his arm off. The dynamo

has no soul, no feelings of affection, no sense of

right or wrong. According to the mechanistic psy-

chology man is a dynamo: if he tears your arm off

or pokes your eye out, or cuts the heart from your

breast, it is not his fault. The knife was in his hand

and he could no more control the knife than the

knife could control him. When a soprano on the

amateur hour murders a high note, or does hideous

execution on some beautiful lyric, the impressario

says, “All right, all right”. So when the bandit

kills a citizen we must say “All right! All right!”

Everything is all right. Nothing is wrong. Right



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 71

and wrong, good and bad, do not exist in a world

of machines.

My friends, I know this is not dignified philos-

ophy. But why should I waste either dignity or

philosophy on a theory that can be exploded by

common sense?

But believe me, today, in a hundred universities,

in ten thousand novels, in many a play and in mul-

titudinous private conversations and arguments,

the idea is broached—and believed—that man is
not master of his actions, that he is not captain of

his soul, for the simple reason that there is no soul.

The current philosophy, the prevalent ethics, is that

man is either a brute or a machine, that all his

thoughts and words and actions are predetermined,

that he has nothing to say about what he shall think

or what he shall do; that right and wrong are

obsolete words that should be dropped from the

dictionary; that conscience is a superstition, that

we must say of the whole wide world what Kipling’s

soldier says of the region east of Suez “There ain’t

no Ten Commandments and the ’oest is like the

worst”.

Don’t imagine that this mad immoralism is held

only by sensational writers of sordid novels. Dreiser

said aloud what the professors who teach Deter-

minism (and like the swine at Gadara, their name is

legion) are inculcating but don’t dare put in plain

every day speech: Man is an animal and nothing

more. Man is a machine and nothing more.

The only refuge against this nonsense, this

lunacy, this moral nihilism, is the Christian doctrine

that man is no mere piece of mechanism but a living

self-determining organism, no mere brute animal,



72 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

something more than a placental mammal, a bacillus

or a microscopic infusorium; a soul made in the

image of God and responsible to God, a kind of God

upon the earth.



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 73

SHALL WE LOOK TO GENEVA OR TO
BETHLEHEM?

Address delivered on December 22, 1935

It is a trite saying that when Christ came the

world was badly in need of Him. Whether it needed

Him more then than it does now is a question. Per-

haps a foolish question. At least it does seem ridi-

culous to say, as chroniclers in every century have

said, “The world is worse oif now than it ever was.”

That sentiment has been repeated like a refrain in

thousands of speeches, letters, official documents,

biographies, histories, and even in purely literary

works, for generation after generation. King Solo-

mon 2900 years ago had grown weary of it: “Say

not, what thinkest thou is the cause that former

times were better than they are now? for this

manner of question is foolish.”

So, let us simply say that the world into which

Christ was first born had sore need of Him and that

the world in which He is now re-born has plenty of

reason to welcome His coming. Perhaps, however,

I had better not dissemble but declare my conviction

that badly off as we are in a hundred ways—politi-
cally, socially, morally, economically—our condition
is not nearly so desperate as that of the world “when

Christ our Lord was born on Christmas Day”.

This is not the place in which to attempt any-

thing like an adequate resume of the condition of

that “hard pagan world” as Matthew Arnold called

it, or of the degenerate and desperate Jewish

world.

But briefly, consider the political condition of



74 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

Palestine. It is typified in King Herod, monstrous,

preternatural combination of athlete and sybarite,

tyrant and sycophant, religious fanatic and skeptic,

soldier and politician, adept both in diplomatic

chicanery and bloody terrorism; extortioner, blood-

sucker, spendthrift, parricide, Bluebeard. One

might be tempted to say that no such incredible

assemblange of qualities could ever have been found

in any one man. But for good or bad “there were

giants in those days”, Caesar and Pompey and Oc-

tavius : it was only a generation or two since Marius

and Sulla, who had staged the cruelest civil war in

all history; and in half a century more came Nero

and Caligula. King Herod may seem impossible and

unthinkable but authentic history vouches for him

as actual. We have no such human-inhuman mon-
strosity on the earth nowadays. In fact I doubt if

we could synthetically produce another Herod if we

were to combine all the dictators and warriors and

persecutors now alive. Such cruelties as the Calles-

Gil-Cardenas regime has pereptrated in Mexico are

child’s play in comparison with Herod’s bloody

deeds, and such multiple murders as those of the

Bolsheviks were every day occurrences in Palestine.

The royal monster killed his wife, his three brothers-

in-law, his wife’s mother, his two sons by his first

wife and a third son by his second. He bribed the

Romans with a vast pile of gold to leave him master

in Jerusalem, and thereupon closed the gates and

slaughtered all within them who failed to meet his

pleasure. Such was the ogre into whose hands the

infant Jesus would have fallen were it not for the

miracle of the warning to the Wise Men. But as

political rulers went in those days, he was no wild



75IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

aberration. There were others of much the same

type.

As for the Romans, Herod’s masters, they

winked at all these enormities. They exacted prodi-

gious tribute from the puppet king, and cared not if

he bled the poor people and assassinated the rich to

secure it. The ancient motto of the Romans Fiat

justitia ruat coelum—“Let justice be done though
the heavens fall”—looks well in a copy-book and
doubtless sounded noble to the Romans who, like

other conquerors, propagated beautiful myths about

themselves. But there was little justice in Rome.

So much for the masters. As for the people, we

simply cannot visualize the horrors of their lot.

Hundreds of thousands of them were slaves. Mil-

lions of others were subjects and subjects were little

better off than slaves. Even so-called citizens had

no rights that a ruler must respect. Constitutional

limits to royal and imperial power were unheard of.

It would have been treason to present or even to

conceive a Bill of Rights. All kings were despots.

They did what they pleased. When drunk or crazed

with power, they became “impossible” and somebody

stabbed them—simple system but a slow method of
rectifjdng abuses. And then they were not recti-

fied. The next king was as absolute and generally

tyrannical as the last king. An occasional exception

occurred like Trajan or Marcus Aurelius. But

Trajan, the most humane of them all, prepared for

the people the slaughter of 10,000 gladiators who

fought one another over a period of 135 days until

all were dead. Marcus Aurelius, phrase-maker,

philosopher, moralist, cultured gentleman, killed

some hundreds of thousands of Christians. Christ-



• 76 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

ians of course were not “people”. Neither were

subjects, nor slaves, nor captives, nor gladiators.

“Citizens” proud of the title and jealous of its

privileges were abused, impoverished, imprisoned,

murdered with impunity. St. Paul was a “citizen”,

and as such claimed the rights attached to citizen-

ship, but it didn’t save his head.

In modern times we sometimes explain the

wretchedness of certain races or local populations

by recalling that their land was fought over again

and again by multitudinous armies. But in those

days the common people were, so to speak, the ter-

rain upon which kings fought one another. Rivals

like Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Octa-

vian and Mark Antony, decimated the population

again and again and again. At the precise moment

when our Savior appeared there was peace, and

there had been peace for a few years, but before

that and after that wars were incessant, and ende-

mic in all lands.

But it wasn’t political justice or social regenera-

tion that the world needed most when Christ came.

It wanted above all religious and spiritual recon-

struction. It has been remarked that the religion

of Israel underwent a change during the Babylonian

captivity. Before the Jews were led away into

Babylon they had been forever falling back into

idolatry. But strange to say, when they came back

from the land of idolatry they were cured of idol-

atry. Perhaps the near view of the abominations

of idolatrous worship produced disgust and loathing

and removed the temptation, just as amongst our-

selves a man may recoil from drunkenness or impur-

ity if he sees its consequences in their real hideous-



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 77

ness. But in place of idolatry came something quite

as bad, a dead ritual. Pharisaism grew stronger and

with Pharisaism the practice of mechanical routine

in place of deep fervent warm-hearted religion.

Cunningham Geikie in his Life and Words of Christ

describes the kind of ''piety'' our Savior was to see.

He says

:

''Among the many figures whom our Lord passed
in the streets of Jerusalem, and elsewhere, he must
often have met those to whom the by-name was
given of Schechemite Pharisees—who kept the Law
only for interest, as Shechem submitted to circum-
cision simply to obtain Dinah; or the Tumbling
Pharisee who, to appear humble before men, always
hung down his head, and shuffled with his feet on
the ground, so that he constantly stumbled; or the

Bleeding Pharisee who, to keep himself from seeing
a woman, walked with his eyes shut, and, so, often
bled his head against posts; or the Mortar Pharisee,

with a cap like a mortar over his eyes, to shut out all

that might shock his pure nature; or the What-more-

can-I-do Pharisee, who claimed to have kept the
whole Law, and wished to know something new, that
he might do it also; or the Pharisee from Fear, who
kept the Law only for fear of the judgment to
come.”

Hand in hand with these hypocrisies went such

puerilities as always spring up when religion com-

mences to decay. And with the puerilities a belief

in foolish and fantastic miracles. To illustrate,

several rabbis were holding a dispute over some

picayune matter of ritual observance. “One cried

out, when his opinion was disputed, ‘May this tree

prove that I am right !’ and forthwith the tree was

torn up by the roots, and hurled a hundred ells off.

But his opponents declared that a tree could prove

nothing. ‘May this stream, then, witness for me!’

cried Eliezer, and at once it flowed the opposite

way. Still, his opponents urged that water could



78 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

prove nothing. ‘Now’, said Eliezer, ‘if truth be on

my side, may the walls of the school confirm it !’ He
had scarcely spoken when the wall began to bow in-

wards. The Rabbi Joshua threatened them: ‘What

is it to you if the sons of the wise dispute? you

shall not fall’; and, to honour Rabbi Joshua, the

walls did not fall wholly together; but neither did

they go back to their places that the honour of Rabbi

Eliezer might not suifer, but remain slanting to this

day.”

Now what sort of Savior must Christ be to deal

with such a world, a world of cruelty, social injus-

tice, and religious superstition? The people, poor

blind people led by blind guides, expected a Christ

who would be, as it were, a composite of Alexander,

Darius, Attila, Genghis Khan, and Mohammed. The

Jerusalem Targum says: “How beautiful is the

King Messiah, who springs from the house of

Judah! He girds His loins, and descends, and orders

the battle against His enemies, and slays their kings

and their chief captains; there is no one so mighty

as to stand before Him. He makes the mountains

red with the blood of His slaughtered foes: His

robes, dyed in their blood, are like the skins of the

purple grapes. The beasts of the field will feed for

twelve months on the flesh of the slain, and the birds

of the air will feed on them for seven years. The

Lord will revenge us on the bands of Gog. At that

hour will the power of the nations be broken; they

will be like a ship whose tackling is torn away, and

whose mast is sprung, so that the sail can no longer

be set on it. Then will Israel divide the treasures

of the nations among them—a great store of booty
and riches, so that, if there be the lame and blind



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 79

among them, even they will have their share. The

heathen will then turn to the Lord, and walk in His

light.”

No wonder they didn’t recognize the Christ

when He came. The difference between their pic-

ture of Him, a ruthless merciless conqueror, and the

actual Jesus is immeasurable. The greatest tragedy

in all the long eventful history of the people of God

is that they did not recognize their Savior when He

came. “He came unto His own and His own re-

ceived Him not.” They had been taught to expect a

rich Messias and He came poor, the poorest of the

poor, born in a stable, very nearly born in the

street. They looked for a king who would destroy

all other kings, and He had to flee from the wrath

of the king of His own people. Contemporary pro-

phets, false prophets sadly degenerated from Isaias

and Jeremias and Malachias, had pictured for them

a world conqueror and here was only a helpless babe

on a pallet of straw with no cradle but the feeding

trough of the cattle and with the most hastily im-

provised swaddling clothes. As king, conqueror,

avenger of the rights of His people. He was a dis-

mal failure in their eyes.

I say their misconception of the character of the

Christ was tragic. But what of our own? We have

a half dozen world shaking problems today, prob-

lems economic, problems social, problems in inter-

national relationship; war in progress in Africa,

greater war threatening in Europe, and perhaps the

greatest of all wars preparing between Europe and

Asia, and has any one the courage and the faith to

say to the diplomats and the generals, “Come to

Bethlehem! There you will find the Solution of all



80 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

problems, the Settlement of all controversies. Ve-

nite, venite, in Bethlehem!” If some one did say it,

would the generals and the diplomats pay any heed?

No, they look not to a Baby in a manger in a stable

with a peasant mother, a poor country carpenter as

foster father, and a group of illiterate shepherds

who just happened in from the fields to see the

strange sight of a human baby born like a sheep in

the straw. The big-wigs of the world would think

it a jest if you told them “The answer to all the

problems and puzzles that bewilder you and bedevil

you is in the mind of that new-born Child. The

day will come when He will speak out His mind.

Follow Him and the world will be saved.” To them

such language would sound like superstition, fan-

aticism, religious hallucination. The world looks

not to the Babe of Bethlehem. It thinks to find sal-

vation elsewhere—at Versailles, or Geneva, or
Locarno. It still thinks that wrongs are to be

righted by the method of Julius Caesar, armies,

wars, conquests of barbaric peoples. It believes

paradoxically, madly that the cure for war is more

war and that we must extricate ourselves from the

maze in which diplomatic maneuvering has placed

us by more diplomatic maneuvering. Some there

are who look neither to Bethlehem nor to Geneva but

to Moscow, not to a new-born Babe in the manger,

but to a dead statesman, embalmed and on exhibi-

tion in a glass case, and back of him to a philosopher

of a century ago who taught the dictatorship of the

proletariat, which means, translated into simple

terms, the exchange of the domination of the poor

by the rich for the domination of the rich by the

poor, the curiously insane doctrine that peace be-



IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 81

tween man and man can be brought about by means

of a war between class and class.

Those who seek salvation listen to an American

journalist who says that we cannot have peace until

one nation becomes powerful enough to dominate

all the rest, an opinion he seems to have learned

from a general, also an American, who adds “as

long as people want to eat and have possessions they

must compete for these things with others.” And

competition is war. Or they look to an English

Philosopher who in the face of all recent experience

still doggedly thinks that peace and all other earthly

benefits can be obtained by conferences and con-

gresses. Or to a much advertised but erratic clergy-

man who says sententiously “Men and nations are

saved, by good will, not by political machinery”,

but who in his public utterances for a quarter of a

century has taken every occasion to destroy good

will by fostering nationalistic and racial antago-

nisms. Or they look to a popular writer who re-

assures us with the statement that we are only

12,000 years away from the Stone Age, and that we

have hundreds of millions of years yet to go before

the earth explodes.

Or they look to a psychologist who offers them a

scientific theory that man is driven by an irresis-

tible interior impulse, which he calls “the innate

blind force of aggression”, to conquer his environ-

ment. They even ask the opinion of a Chinese

philosopher who recommends to them Lao Tse, and

tells some millions of people- through a popular

literary medium that we must have more catas-

trophe, universal moral corruption, and arrive at

complete cynicism before we can be saved.



82 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

Yes, man, bewildered man on this unhappy plan-

et, looks here and there and everywhere, everywhere

except to Bethlehem, for light and solace and sal-

vation.

Such is the dark and dubious side of the present

condition of the world. But a brighter aspect of

things is brought to view by the recurrence of

Christmas. The very fact that after all these cen-

turies the birth of Jesus is celebrated by perhaps

one-third of the human race, that the eyes of some

600 millions of people turn towards the Holy Land,

“Holy” because He was born and lived and died

there, is immensely comforting. On Christmas Day

if not at all other times we realize—many of us
dimly but the elect souls intensely—that Salvation,
not merely the eternal salvation of the individual

soul but the salvation of society and of all the races

and nations of mankind, must come out of Bethle-

hem. “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” ask-

ed the critics and the skeptics, and I suppose they

would add “or out of Bethlehem?”. They were

laboring under the ancient obstinate delusion that

all benefits must come from kings, palaces, man-

sions, the homes of the rich; from powerful rulers

and not from a poor disconsolate little village. To-

day, at least in our country, we have learned that a

man of genius, a statesman, a martyr, a benefactor

of mankind, may come out of a log cabin in the most

poverty-stricken corner of a half-savage country.

But still the temptation remains to doubt that a

helpless Baby born in a hole in the rock, in a tenth-

rate village amongst a despised and downtrodden

people, can succeed in saving the world, when kings,

emperors, statesmen, philosophers, parliaments,



IP NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT? 83

congresses, leagues and all manner of human de-

vices, have failed. But on the other hand the world,

which thinks nothing of contradicting itself, quite

generally admits that if the Babe of Bethlehem

Jesus Christ could have His way, good will would

come to all the earth and with good will salvation in

time and eternity.

We say quite commonly that the Gospel has not
been tried and found wanting but that it has not

been tried. The wisdom is there but we haven’t the

wisdom to make use of it. We haven’t the wisdom,
we haven’t the courage, we haven’t the faith, or the

divine grace, to give the Babe of Bethlehem a

chance. Only lately an Indian philanthropist, call-

ed by his people a Mahatma, a man not technically

a Christian but more Christian than many who call

themselves Christian, arose to rebuke us, gently

but effectively: “It is my conviction that the root

,
of the evil is want of a living faith in a living God.

It is a first-class human tragedy that peoples of the

earth, who claim to believe in the message of Jesus,

whom they describe as Prince of Peace, show little

of that belief in actual practice.”

On Christmas Day therefore it would seem

proper to resolve that He who was born of Mary

in Bethlehem should be invited to exercise His di-

vine vocation as Savior of the world and that no

obstacle be placed in His way.

There is a song usually sung on Palm Sunday

but quite as appropriate to Christmas, “Jesus

comes! The people at His voice recover the liberty

they had lost. Humanity restores to every man

his right.”

The obvious comment upon that sentiment is

that it is idealistic, not realistic, a hope and not a



84 IF NOT CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

fact. But at Christmas time we are in an idealistic

mood. Now if ever, we believe that ideals can be

made real and hopes be transmuted into facts.

Christmas comes but once a year, alas. But if the

spirit of Christmas could remain every day in the

year—and why should it not?—this poor, old,
weary, disconsolate world could be made over not

indeed into a paradise—that can come only here-
after—but into a home for man where peace and
contentment and happiness might reign.



CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIMS

OF THE CATHOLIC HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the

studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York

City, March 2, 1930.)

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the

National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all

who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use

this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy

expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its

musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of

inquiries, must be met. . . .

This radio hour is for all the people of the United States.

To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to

express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For

this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly

will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am

sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic

background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and

with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-

tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . .

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is

no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that

task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our

countrymen. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country

who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material,

and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa-

thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue.

So may it be fulfilled. This word of dedication voices, there-

fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known,

to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we

love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make

better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine

through Christ; pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating

our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only

justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques-

tioning hearts.



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