' THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GIFT OF Mrs. Warren Gregory THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION BY HORACE HOLLEY LONDON AND TORONTO SIDGWICK & JACKSON, LTD. 1913 GIF? TO FRANCIS NEWMAN HOLLEY IN LOCO PARENTIS 402 INTRODUCTION UNKNOWN as yet to the many, the historical phenomenon of Christianity is repeating itself in our age. Once more, at a time when the established order, both social and spiritual, has lost its original vitalizing principle, and ordinary experience, bewildered by the clash of tradition with new tendencies, is compelled to look outside itself for the creative vision, a master personality has appeared, whose experience gathered from society all that is essential and permanent, gave it a new unity, definition, and significance, and thus restored a universal religious currency to men. The Bahai movement presents many re- markable parallels with Christianity. In place of John the Baptist, the discerning and articulate element within orthodoxy able to feel the new birth about to take place from the old body, we have Mohammed Ali, the famous " Bab," who announced the prophetic manifestation nineteen years before the event ; then the tremendous figure of Baha'o'llah, centralizing and universal- vii Vlll INTRODUCTION izing the movement ; meanwhile the inevitable accompaniment of persecution, a marvellous out- burst of pure faith ; and last (this circumstance unique in the world's religious history), the propagation of Baha'o'llah's teaching by his eldest son, Abdul Baha, insuring its integrity. Originating in Persia only a generation ago, the movement has already penetrated far to the East and West, its followers numbering millions of men and women, who represent every religion, philosophy, race, class, and colour. I have devoted a chapter to this dramatic story, covering the period from the Bab's declaration down to Abdul Baha's memorable visit to Europe and America during the years 1912-13. It is with the Bahai teaching, which extends religion so as to include modern science, and morality so as to coincide with modern economic and political conditions, that I have been chiefly concerned. But I have endeavoured to present it as a system inevitable in terms of our social evolution, and therefore approached Bahaism step by step, working gradually toward it through familiar types and problems, I pre- ferred, in short, to derive Baha'o'llah's unique relation to the modern world from the sheer logic and advantage of his teaching, rather than to derive the logic and advantage of his teaching INTRODUCTION IX from any authority arbitrarily attached, even by reverent love, to his person or to his relation to the modern world. It seemed to me that in this way a wider and more enduring interest in and for the movement could be secured. So it is that I have begun this book as though Bahaism, its founders, its teaching, and its believers did not exist, but have summoned, as it were, a convention of all men and women of goodwill, reverence, and natural though often bewildered faith a convention which, out of its own experience, comes to agree upon certain fundamental conclusions concerning society and the spiritual life, and certain methods by which these conclusions can best be realized in action. These conclusions are no other than the Bahai teaching ; the method is no other than the relation of Baha'o'llah to social evolution. For the deeper interest arising from unprejudiced personal agreement, I willingly forewent the advantage I possessed in the fact that Bahaism has already established itself throughout the world. HORACE HOLLEY. PARIS, May 2, 19] 3. THE OUTLOOK CONTENTS PART I 1 PART II A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE - - 19 PART III THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS - - - 79 PART IV THE DIVINE TEACHER .... 129 PART V HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT - - - 155 PART VI THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED - 186 APPENDIX I A PILGRIMAGE TO THONON - - - 209 APPENDIX II A PRAYER FOR UNITY - - - 218 APPENDIX III BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BAHAI LITERATURE - - 220 XI " I believe that at this very hour the great revolution is beginning which has been pre- paring for two thousand years in the religious world the revolution which will substitute for corrupted religion, and the system of domina- tion which proceeds therefrom, the true Religion, the basis of equality between men, and of the true liberty to which all beings en- dowed with reason aspire." TOLSTOY. PART I THE OUTLOOK THE intellectual despair of the past generation, best represented, perhaps, by the poetry of Matthew Arnold, has become an unnecessary if not impossible condition. We can accept the agnostic attitude as a splendid display of courageous sincerity, as a tradition of sym- pathetic tolerance not lightly to be forgotten, but we need assume neither its conclusion nor its pain. Within two decades, enlightened Euro- pean sentiment has gone over from intelligent scepticism to intelligent mysticism, from manly denial to manly affirmation and activity. Re- ligion, in fact, with its eternal power to intensify the inward life, has swept back into human experience. It offers once more the possession of a great happiness independent of outward circumstances ; it restores again an ennobling admiration, a renewing activity, to the most 3 4 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION indifferent life. Its latest return, however, is made notable by the phenomenon that its origin does not exist in the deep, undisciplined heart of the people, but in the scientific and philosophic mind ; that it has not appeared as a popular excitement, overwhelming by its very intensity and volume, whatever condemnation or denial a highly-educated minority might pronounce against it, but rather, derived from the develop- ment of knowledge by that same minority, it has actually been carried by them to the people. The scientist, compelled to realize the presence of psychic forces in the universe, admits to the shepherd that his hope of immortality is founded in reason ; the philosopher, becoming aware of sources of knowledge beyond reason, and func- tions of activity above intellect, constitutes him- self the willing priest of prophetic Revelation. By some mysterious fertilizing process, some slow but effectual fermentation, the human mind seems to have attained a new condition of health. Enriched by generations of discovery and in- vestigation, it finds itself no longer divided, but whole. To the shepherd's and fisherman's passion for personal holiness, the modern man can ally, as an added factor of enjoyment and power, the THE OUTLOOK 5 treasures of knowledge accumulated since the passing of Christ. That precious secret of great souls throughout history, that a man may be both wise and mystical, both profoundly learned and simply, even tenderly faithful, has at last been whispered abroad to our common inspira- tion. After so much doubt, so much restlessness, so much confusion, so much agony both in- dividual and social, we know for ever and unchangeably know that our intellectual and spiritual natures can not only be reconciled from their long attitude of mutual opposition and stultification, but fused into one eager, throbbing instrument of purpose and power. Man is no longer cleft in two, his courage severed from his happiness, his initiative parted from his virtue. No. He is a wonderful, complex unity, an eternal equilibrium of soul, sense, and reason, fitted to draw pleasure from the three worlds of spirit, body, and mind, at home in each, and given some authority in all. All the old sources of happiness are restored, with an added faculty of discrimination and creative receptivity. The old neglected gardens of faith open before us, to enter if we will. Whether we study St. Augus- tine to learn the beginning and process of faith, 6 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION or meditate upon the life of St. Francis to enter the mystery of adoration, by the sure token of the universality of spiritual experience, we shall find them more modern than Haeckel, even as they are more profound than Taine. Another phenomenon, however, even more remarkable and significant than the intellectual origin of modern faith, is the coeval appearance in our civilization of another source and centre of loyal devotion. Indeed, this contemporary movement, the movement for social reform throughout all the phases of human endeavour, possesses a far broader social basis and an in- finitely more extended following. Within its scope must be included, even though they share no common organization, the search for a truer democracy than any yet attained, manifested in every government on earth as a progressive instability, a falling forward, so to speak, from adjustment to adjustment ; the Socialist propa- ganda, which means a similar need for economic justice ; the splendid fight for women's rights, in which are held suspended consequences vastly more important to human welfare than either Democracy or Socialism ; " Modernism " in the Catholic Church, which represents a THE OUTLOOK 7 determined effort to unite ecclesiasticism with modern science ; the rise of scientific charity ; the foundations for international peace, with which logically must be associated the develop- ment of a universal language for secondary use ; the concentration of capital into great corpora- tions, which makes possible a future economic efficiency not wholly removed from economic justice ; while neither last nor least, perhaps, we may add the almost imperceptible yet radical changes at work modifying both the ideals and methods of education. I have no need to men- tion the numerous other social activities now going forward, nor to discuss at any length those already included, to exhibit the incredible extent of this modern insistence upon social regeneration and reform. Each activity stamps its own clear, stern impression of power and significance, evoking a response which, whether sympathetic or hostile, invariably connotes a deep recognition of that power. Not one movement but drives to the heart of some unendurable agony or shame ; not one but reveals the unhealed stab of some social inequality or the rusted chains of some social sin. These movements have gathered to themselves most of our positive 8 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION idealism as well as most of our collective will. Like so many crusades, they hurl themselves against traditional authority with self-forgetful passion, knowing only too well that in privilege, grown powerful and presumptuous, lies, insulted or ignored, the true cross of redress. This com- mon necessity and indignation drives them all, and one other fundamental identity unites the limbs of this otherwise unco-ordinated social body. The revival of religious faith and mysticism among philosophers and scientists I have re- marked as a modern phenomenon. I have stated that they are constituting themselves the voluntary apostles of Divine Revelation, carry- ing that message of spiritual renewal and intensi- fication to the people, instead of receiving, as in the past, a spiritual regeneration from them. But what response are these enlightened mission- aries able to arouse ? What is the answer given by the people to this invitation to re-enter the inner garden of mysticism and faith ? They return no answer at all, since from the nature of things they cannot understand the appeal. It is explicable only to the few possessing the academic training or sheer intellectual power THE OUTLOOK 9 necessary to follow the new argument through- out its psychological and biological evolution. Simple, essential as the final conclusion may be, it has been strained through an intellectual medium unknown and unknowable to the many, with the result that the scientists and philos- ophers find themselves shut off from men by the wall of their own specialized training. To the majority, religion is still enveloped in a tradi- tional theology and ecclesiasticism, and they cannot imagine a spiritual activity without their old enemy, the priest. We might wonder, therefore, if the old exaltation had for ever fled our social consciousness ; if the great heart of Europe were at last broken by its new burden of mechanical industry ; if materialism had utterly blighted both the memory and the desire of that inward assurance which recovered, for each generation, from the scorching heat of war or the desolate winter of famine, the first, fine, careless rapture of human life. We might wonder whether even spirituality, the presence of God in His children, were not to become an aristocratic privilege, dependent upon the possession of a trained mind, or at least upon immunity from the de-spiritualizing process of factory and tene- 10 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION merit. To the Christian ideal of personal salva- tion, at all events, men seem increasingly indifferent. In losing their reverence for the cloistered saint as the highest human ideal, the majority have also put away all interest in the psychological or religious method and evolution by which the ascetic and celibate types are pro- duced. The healthiest modern conscience, in short, has rejected for ever the once-adored Christian mystery. That is, neither publicly nor privately will it announce its own utter sinfulness and depravity, with its consequent dependence upon gospel or priest. It will not imitate nor readily admire Augustine's confes- sion and self-crucifixion as the indispensable beginning of a new life in God. By his denial of such confessions, therefore, the modern man shatters for all time the solemn gothic splendour of the Christian tradition. But must such denial and indifference shatter also the possibility of divine manhood ; must it destroy all religious mystery, all spiritual con- sciousness and growth ; must it, in a word, prevent the co-operation of God in the human soul ? Before answering this ultimate and all- important question, or permitting any authority THE OUTLOOK 11 whatever to answer it for us, let us ask a further question of the facts we have combined. Among what social elements is derived this second activity I have touched upon, this determined passion for social purity and equality, this devoted, tireless effort to bring about a better, fairer world ? Surely, among those very types and classes who most vigorously oppose the Christian tradition ! To the enlightened mysti- cism offered by philosophy as, after all, the truest possible personal ideal, the people, self-reliant and confident, oppose the ideal of social service. In some blind, unconscious, intuitive manner, the masses feel a subtle danger inevitably latent within the old religious experience an unknown, decentralizing force to which they must never again yield if they hope to carry out their pro- gramme of reform. They know that once entered upon, the religious path will lead them away, one by one, from the world and its wrongs, leaving those wrongs as a heritage to their children's children and in their children's children for ever. Unconsciously, intuitively also, they feel that religion should not contain such a danger, should not threaten the success of their cause that this of itself constitutes part of the 12 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION complex injustice by which they suffer yet, if Christianity and Socialism be inalterably opposed, so much the worse for Christianity. In vain, therefore, the preacher points out the fact that this nameless force they resist is the Divine Presence ; that if they yield entirely to this directing power, they will find a great inward happiness more than compensating for all oppres- sion, a delight in pain itself, and, at last, a passionately triumphant acquiescence in humility and obedience. It is in vain. Somehow the ancient appeal has lost its intoxication, the great challenge its compelling reality. The modern man is not concerned with his own possible damnation. He is too much concerned with the actual damnation of the world. In this condition of affairs we have two sets of opposing forces the opposition of classes and the opposition of ideas. This mutual hostility has served to make each movement more definite and self-conscious, compelling each to look to the truth and the human desirability of its claim ; but it has served also to divide and weaken our avail- able social power. To all intents and purposes the Western world has two camps the Christian and the Socialist. All men and women belong THE OUTLOOK 13 to one or the other, either by reason of disposition and belief, of environment, or social and economic necessity. Yet already there is an increasing number who detest the confinement imposed upon them by adherence to one cause, with the involved hostility to the other. Many an earnest Christian has gone over to the Socialists, carrying his religious faith into the other camp. Reform, they say, is only the extension of the Golden Rule ; and thus we see a third division arising, including those Christians who accept the Socialist ideal and those Socialists who feel the need of the religious life. It is the purpose of this book to follow each line of advance the advance of Christianity toward Socialism, and the advance of Socialism toward Christianity endeavouring thereby to make as clear as possible the exact nature of that ideal, Christian-Socialism, which undoubtedly represents the future faith ; and then to connect these social tendencies with a teaching recently given the world, whose in- fluence has come to be the most powerful existing impetus towards rational and helpful religion. Meanwhile, to arrive at the point which permits a true perspective on the ideal of Christian- Socialism, and permits a sympathetic appreciation 14 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION of the tremendous differences raising it above either Christianity, so-called, or above mere Socialism, we must once more briefly consider the two centres of activity at work in society. First, then, there is the revitalization of personal spirituality made possible by the final agreement of philosophy and religion, science and faith, with its attendant recovery of a long-lost possesion of joy and steadfastness independent of outward cir- cumstances. Second, the accumulating instinct and passion for social reform, indicated by the change in the centres of popular admira- tion from the saint to the plainer but more useful public man, this second source of activity attracting the majority with far greater autho- rity and power than religion, even in its modern adaptation. Like two mighty currents, they flow through our time. We can neither deny their power nor ignore their effect. We can only stand silent between them and reverently ponder how they will influence each other and how both will influence mankind. We remem- ber that the one river rises from the unchang- ing throne of God ; that in it are the divine attributes of joy, steadfastness, peace; while the other rises only from the agony and need THE OUTLOOK 15 of men, containing the despised gifts of political equality, economic independence, and the uni- versal opportunity for education and self-de- velopment. Both, however, share one common property that of making us forget, if we stoop and drink deeply from one, the existence of the other. No man can behold in pure ecstasy the attributes of God within his own soul without straightway losing concern for the world. The invariable effect of this divine possession, this " God-intoxication," is to intensify the importance of all personality and magnify into a new pro- portion the selves of men. Henceforth the pos- sessor sees in every man an object of transcendent intrinsic importance, to be partially identified with God Himself and brought to a similar state of spiritual consciousness by individual treatment to be saved, in other words, at all costs. In- ward spiritual happiness impels men to share their experience with others by a tireless energy more unselfish than motherhood. Likewise no man can ever completely realize the inherent in- justice and diabolical unreasonableness of the social structure, burning at the same time with an inward vision of what humanity should and could be, without straightway flinging down, 16 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION once and for ever, his former desire for personal salvation. He sees the world as a vast, ill- adjusted machine, menacing the physical, mental, and moral health of all its inhabitants at all times. In people he sees only the accidental favourable or unfavourable effect of environment. He has, therefore, only a scant concern for the individual with whom he comes in contact the individual is already stamped with the trade-mark of the machine but his whole being writhes with a fierce passion to change the machine itself, before countless other lives are marred by its gigantic inefficiency. The single flowers he leaves to the sweet devotion of a St. Francis ; but the garden itself, those conditions of earth and air which determine all future plants, this he takes as his Arch-Fiend and Tempter, the annihilating Satan which he must resist and overcome with every breath and muscle and thought within him, whether the gods aid and reward him or not. These two types of men are diametrically opposed. The one cannot understand why the other neglects the opportunity of infinite beati- tude for the sake of material, transient things ; the latter cannot understand why the religious man devotes himself to a handful of people, when THE OUTLOOK 17 the whole future race is mathematically doomed to imperfection and pain. The compromise, the temperate drinking of these waters should be impossible, since it argues either the inability or disinclination to live our human life deeply and rightly. In such a case, to choose wrongly is wiser than to compromise and abstain. Yet before giving ourselves irrevocably to either movement, we should see where and how these two currents meet, that we may not condemn ourselves to the fatal inadequacy of the opposed types just considered. We have every right to insist that our personal spirituality prove service- able to men and that our service, whether political or social, contain that religious motive which makes men clean and glad and strong. PART II A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE II LEAVING our ideas in this balanced opposition for a moment, let us turn to the world itself and learn how the two forces are really working themselves out in terms of history and finding expression in human nature. For of one fact we can be always and wholly certain : that life itself, rightly or wrongly, blindly or intelligently, must push forward through the generations. Nature's activity is independent of our will, even our spiritual passion ; and whether the few or the many prosper or fail, as we have learned to estimate prosperity and failure, humanity dili- gently replenishes its stock, and the story is told somehow to the end. Nature cannot distinguish or prefer : she is concerned with toothache more than poetry ; weeds flourish brazenly in our neglected garden, and where we have lost the rose we shall find the broom. Indeed, this sense of a primitive, triumphant vitality in life throws 21 22 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION a tragic shadow over every individual experience. Our own happiness, after all, means so little to others ; and our most desperate agony of failure or remorse creeps hopelessly into the outer dark- ness of the world's oblivion. Yet, what is this unconscious humanity ? What is this social juggernaut which, by some inexplicable wrongness in things, has the power to make us at once its high priests and its sacrifices, its executioners, and its victims ? We need ask for no ideal motive whatever ; it is more than enough if we ask from selfishness, so-called, and from fear. Each may look out of his own window at the world the view, after all, is much the same. It being our first purpose to understand the point of view of the type which despises the power of religion and trusts to social science for the cure of those structural errors which limit and repress our human life, we can surely do so most fairly and adequately by entering into those experiences which tend to produce such a stand- point in ordinary men and women. Before collecting material for analysis, however, I wish to introduce a short digression, in order that my analyses will be followed with greater sympathy, A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 23 and my final deduction be received with deeper comprehension of its real importance. History, or the annals of mankind, being necessarily written from an impersonal, extra- human point of view, the historian is compelled to establish his perspective outside and beyond any individual man or woman. There being, on the one hand, no individual who possesses the attribute either of immortality or ubiquity, both of which are demanded to make possible a history with an individual perspective and continuity ; and, on the other hand, the fact being evident that even could such an individual be supplied to the historian, the resulting history would most certainly be, if not incomprehensible, yet un- sympathetic to the rest of us all this being the case, the historian compromises by establishing his perspective either within an institution or an idea, since institutions and ideas are, compara- tively speaking, both ubiquitous and immortal. Instead of writing history in terms of personal experience, therefore, the historian writes his records of human life in terms of churches, nations, races, art, science, or some such abstract idea as the evolution of political liberty. Sup- plied with such an impersonal point of view, he 24 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION can collect all his facts into unity and clearness. He can present a story intelligible and of more or less concern to all. If he creates an historical narrative from the national perspective, for example, he establishes in the past a certain importance and personal interest for all inhabi- tants of that nation or those deriving from those inhabitants ; if he discusses a Church, he establishes in the past an importance and personal interest for all members of that par- ticular ecclesiastical division. Likewise with economics or the evolution of political freedom, by selecting from the past the elements that enter into our own present economic or political situation, he endows the past with meaning and moment to all men in proportion as all men are affected by finance and government. But we do not lose sight of the fact that this method is a compromise. In securing for his narrative a relative interest and importance, the historian sacrifices the particular interest and importance. He sinks the individual citizen into the nation, the individual soul into the Church. Magnifying institutions, he minimizes personality ; emphasiz- ing ideas and things, he weakens men. But institutions, whether great or small, transient or A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 25 enduring, have absolutely no importance nor even existence except in so far as they affect the consciousness of men and women. After all, humanity is nothing more than you and I, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, their wives and children, associated into a badly- understood and badly-conducted partnership, whose only conceivable object is to attain and secure our own best welfare. Of what possible human avail is a powerful institution if its members, taken separately, remain pusillani- mous ; of what possible meaning is the propaga- tion of a Divine Ideal if the contributed human lives remain worldly and base ? By uniting the efforts of a thousand comparatively ineffectual people, we can doubtless create an organization which shall exhibit remarkable effectiveness. The Great Pyramid, we recall, was built by a horde of wretched slaves. If the object of this human existence consist in the erection of an impressive tomb, then by concentrating our attention upon the completed pyramid we can easily overlook the servitude it required, or even more easily we can reconcile the chained bodies and the chained souls with the heap of unfeeling stone those bodies and souls were spent for. 26 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION But the fact remains that to the slaves them- selves, most of whom not only perished before the pyramid was completed, but suffered physical agony and spiritual suffocation during every hour of their enforced activity upon it, its ultimate significance, architectural or symbolical, must have proved not merely an unsatisfactory compensation, but an inhuman, an unspeakable insult. While admitting the fact in this par- ticular instance, the reader will add that it is our very weakness and helplessness which makes any institution necessary ; that we are not slaves fulfilling a tyrant's caprice, but free men and women, deriving a more than adequate return in safety, efficiency or happiness from the institu- tions we support ; and that our allegiance, being voluntary, can be broken, renewed, or transferred at our own discretion. The institution, indeed, when subordinated to personality, contributes to both our need and our well-being ; but I cannot insist too strongly that every institution possesses a subtle, centripetally-operating force which, unless eternally resisted, transfers our conscious- ness from men to things, from human experience to mere numbers and size. Though institutions are both powerful and A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 27 enduring, while all men are weak and mortal, yet it is not the record of any institution, how- ever ideal its purpose, by which you and I must measure life and determine its true value. No. The value of life is its worth to individual men and women at single successive instants. If all the flags in the world are flaunted to the bright sun, if all the Masses are being loudly chanted, all the prayers grandiloquently read, yet, while the majority of men and women are wretched, life is a wretched business, and the glory of nations and sanctity of religions is either an angel's aspiration or a devil's lie. Do not be deceived in this matter. Let us not find our security in statistics, but in our own ability. Let us not submissively drag out a useless, hampered existence, and then to our dimming eyes and chilling heart hug the illusion either of flag, cross, or our own still hopeful, still eager children. Whatever they are, we are broken and inglorious, a worn-out hypocrite creeping into his shameful, but restful, grave. Our institution deserts us then ; our wife and children remain isolated and independent personalities; we have only our naked soul at that hour, built inexorably up from the successive experiences 28 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION we ourselves have undergone, and may God keep us all from discovering too late the spiritual impotence of the world. So much for the digression. I hope I have transferred the scale by which we should measure life from its false position in the institution to its true position in the soul. I hope I have scotched, for a few men and women, the head of Eden's eternal serpent, a blind trust in material things. We can now return to the task of collecting material for analysis. Your neighbour, for example, awakes some morning to find his business threatened by unforeseen commercial readjustments his very economic existence, as it were, abruptly, brutally summoned before a blind, capricious judge to be tried for life and death. As a modern man, he will defend his economic self with almost the same desperation that he would summon up to resist an assault upon his physical being, since at our stage of social progress the two are well- nigh identical ; and he suddenly realizes how vitally all that is superior, enjoyable, comfortable, or even decent has become entangled in this question of wealth. He feels the same blind, instinctive terror, followed instantly by a shock A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 29 of supremely-wrathful indignation against the hostile force, whether personal or impersonal, individual or organized, that he feels against the bully who leaps upon him from the dark, or the enormous, pitiless army, slowly, but irresistibly, approaching his native town. As to the man seized by the plague, the whole world is changed. He has become aware of an outer darkness just beyond our busy, electric- lighted thoroughfares, which holds in ambush an eternal, relentless foe. He knows that it is only incidental that he is the present victim that this enemy is the enemy of all men, but can strike only those who wander or are thrust too near the fatal line. He wonders how men and women can laugh or quarrel about trifles in the neighbourhood of such a foe. He wants aid, sympathy, fellowship, and turns to society as the exhausted swimmer looks yearningly at the .shore. There, however, he finds a great indifference to his personal fate, but an equal indifference to its own danger. In the public parks, though, he may notice certain shabby, silent men sitting meaninglessly on the benches in the sun. Beneath their squalor he sees, with a new and poignant penetration, the all but 30 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION obliterated marks of respectability ; beneath their ineffectual, empty apathy, he discerns an old vigour and intelligence; beneath their turgid despair he rediscovers the throbbing heart of man's holy sorrow and delight. These men, he whispers to himself, these men were once what I am; these men are what I may be; and at the thought his soul seems to stand at the edge of some burning desert of tribulation, too vast for terror, too awful for grief. In these broken old men he realizes that there is neither sympathy nor help ; they have lost the power to understand or feel another's misfortune, even when it mirrors back their own, while broken and socially impotent as they have become, they can no longer raise a hand to point out or stay the common tragedy. In them, however, he sees the ghastly warnings which time and destiny have raised to prevent the recurrence of such misery in other lives the skeletons strewn along the sand of that desert to frighten away the social caravan but, as he turns away, he knows that not until now has the warning been legible, and that had he not faced their ruin in himself he would have remained completely indifferent, or, which is no better, in the ordinary A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 31 state of personal sympathy, which cares for the wounded and buries the dead without knowing just where the battlefield lies or just who is the enemy. Your neighbour, however, knows both. From that day he knows that the battlefield extends over our whole social life, and includes every phase of human activity ; that economics proper is only the front line of that army of defence in which every science has its own peculiar and important part. But he knows more. In a vague, yet decided and terrible way, he knows that the enemy is not a superhuman power, vested in the processes of wind and tide, nor even a distinct, definable class of society. No. Friend and foe wear the same uniform, employ the same weapons, stand side by side, face to face, and back to back in one awful, frantic chaos and desolation. Lifelong friends unwittingly contribute to one another's downfall; fathers pass or approve laws which in the future may wound their own children's well-being. Nay, even more; for your neighbour finds that he himself has proudly and resolutely held views which he now sees opening like deadly mines underfoot. As in some tremendous Old Testa- 32 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION ment vision he beholds our modern unregulated competitive industrialism like a vast, unimpeach- able conspiracy, in which every man, employer, or workman, rich or poor, necessarily is a member, and of which all men are potentially the victims. Yet, to his great comfort, he discovers that he is not utterly alone in this realization. Great spirits of the past, who possessed the power of social observation, have laid the foundation of a cleaner, sweeter labouring humanity. Round these names, as round undaunted banners which no selfishness and no blindness can pull down, rally an increasing number of individuals and groups, each aware of the common danger, and intent only upon destroying the cause. Your neighbour, therefore, if he luckily avoids financial ruin, or, having failed, retains means enough to secure a little leisure, allies himself with some such society as being the only tool available to his purpose and need. The Church offers him no leverage, for its business is the saving of souls ; like the State, it is worse than useless, for its roots draw their nourishment from the very soil he hopes to plough over and resow. Private societies, accordingly, little States within A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 38 the national State, offer him a footing; and thankful for even a foothold in ground he has learned to fear like quicksand, he takes up the task of reform. Henceforth, his life consists of one revelation upon another. First, he learns the impotence of the individual. A leaf might have more possibility of controlling the tree than one man this monstrous organism ; a drop of water could easier stop the tide than one man the fluctuations of this social sea. Through organization, on the other hand, he can reasonably hope to prove effective, since the organization supplies a lever whose working force multiplies by membership. To render the organization powerful, however, he next learns that the individual must subject his own opinion to the general will. In his present state of mind, this demands no sacrifice. Indeed, he wonders how any man can cling to his own whims and prejudices in the face of such overwhelming necessity. Like a soldier to his captain, he looks only to the official head for command, and does not so much obey a personal authority as the compelling spirit of battle. His next discovery is the presence of countless other societies, a thousand little states jealously 3 34 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION carved from the national body. Each is funda- mentally like his own, an organization composed of men who, either by rare sympathy or bitter experience, have grown aware of certain un- necessary evils preventing humanity from its full flower and springtime, certain sicknesses, as it were, within the social frame which irritate, perplex, and discourage the mind of man. While all the world is busy with its walnuts and wine, these devoted, intelligent few live only for their cause, their self-imposed trust and responsibility. But these other organizations, while not hostile to his own, but, on the contrary, equally consecrated to the general welfare, prove, nevertheless, a resisting, deterring influence to its beneficial effects, and an unconscious brake upon its triumphant progress. This is not only because the other organizations have amassed a certain number of valuable men and women into one compact body against which his ideas vainly strike ; not only because the social river is thereby crowded with shipping which impedes his own free navigation ; but rather because each organization has become the centre of an ideal, and by its very intensifying and spiritualizing power has separated certain A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 35 human hopes into an isolated, self-conscious virtue. That is, producing a distinct ideal, each organization sets up a new tendency among the unorganized majority, a new direction for the unguided efforts of the race. But the average man, the man who has only a limited social energy to expend after fulfilling the daily demands of his own family, but who, being the average man, therefore supplies the source of all social energy, this man, confronted by a multi- tude of organizations, finds his interest divided and his energy scattered into as many different channels. Concerned rather with social welfare in general than with any particular phase of it, he would naturally prefer to see the results of his activity count immediately and directly for the general benefit. Instead, he must give a penny here, a half-hour there; he must read a mere paragraph or two from each chapter if he hopes to cover the book ; or he must con- centrate upon one ideal and neglect the rest. In either event, the result in terms of society is the same division and loss of energy, or concentration and sacrifice of the broad, effective, statesmanlike vision. And he learns only too soon that the efficiency of these social organiza- THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION tions is not more than 10 per cent. His con- tributions of time and money are largely wasted on mere organization expense. But the breadth of outlook and consequent co-ordination of energy usually sacrificed is precisely the one essential social virtue. Your neighbour, who by this time has become a wiser and sadder, if not discouraged man, accepts this fact as the very heart of his experience. He knows that scientific investigation, international peace, and other admirable activities are often made possible only by funds contributed by interests inherently opposed to the result such activities supremely desire ; he knows that the resources of a Christian church in New York were for a long time invested in a manner that would make an I ago blush for shame. Every- where he sees a division more fatal than the chasm between rich and poor, white and black, Oriental and Occidental the division in man's ownjiature. Within us all the economic man strangles the spiritual man, the patriot manacles the Christian, the husband and father outvote the philanthropist. This division is absolutely fatal, since it brings an enfeebled, cowardly human nature to the task of its own regeneration. A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 37 By making it impossible for the Christian clergy- man to preach the real Christ, and equally impossible for the layman to live the real Christ, we appoint a desperately sick man his own physician. Now, to prevent anyone from objecting that I insist too strongly on the economic situation to prevent any of those excellent people who, never having lain awake in the cold sweat of poverty, think that wealth, or a', least a competence, is God's own Who's Who of righteousness to prevent these sound sleepers from believing that such insistence is only unbalanced demagogy I shall give one more example of our social wrong- ness and stupidity, selecting one that will have upon it no taint. Your other neighbour is a successful professional man, happily married, public spirited, energetic, and sane. Of his three children, he instinctively loves best his youngest, a daughter of fourteen. She is a slight, sensitive little spirit, exceptionally receptive, yet not at all abnormal. Pioneer ancestors have contributed a vitality and elasticity tempered and refined by the blood of scholars. She gives every promise of rich, noble womanhood, conspicuous and valuable by its possession of spiritual significance. 38 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION All this, be it understood, is appreciated by your neighbour and his wife. One day the child seems dull and silent, the next she asks permission to remain at home, and by evening lies under medical attention, a feverish, overwrought little nervous system. She has been over-conscientious in her studies and over-sensitive in her relations with her mates, and, being the stock and fibre she is, has driven herself unnoticed to the verge of the last precipice, responding with every delicate nerve and sense both to the presence of an ill- assorted group of children, and to the pressure of a heavy, impersonal educational machine. While her mother, consequently, gives twenty hours daily to the crushed flower, wondering if those little bruised petals will ever again unfold to the sun, her father, not less devoted though removed, nor less anxious though busy with his own routine her father may well wonder what pro- vision society makes for its exceptions, its superior types, and whether much deviation from the hearty, undiscriminating average is desirable in our world. A fierce resentment comes over him as he learns the systematized, inelastic trust-company methods of modern public instruction, which A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 39 operates upon the mind with no heed of the body from which it derives and reacts, and, like a wild, arcadian dream, he begins to picture a truer education. He sees in every boy and girl an ideal possibility an embryonic manhood and womanhood compounded less of information than of aspiration, less of learning accurately than feeling deeply, less of systematized brain-cells than a harmonious co-ordination between spirit, mind, and body. He recalls his own school- days, and his matured experience reviews his childhood and youth, when, with every other boy, he " did what he was told, as well as he could." He traces his progress through school, college, and business ; and at every successful period of his career, every point where he rose to the full tide of power and accomplishment, he distinctly recognizes that the elements directly responsible for success had been the enthusiasm and imagina- tion that entered into his work, not the infor- mation. Moreover, he recognizes that the country life general during his boyhood had unconsciously effected a natural relationship between thought-circulation and blood-circula- tion which has never been replaced for the children of towns and cities, although the 40 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION intellectual demands made upon adolescence are at least double those made a generation ago. Information, he observes, is only the paid servant of education ; and he resolves the whole conflict between classics and sciences, Greek and econom- ics, into one simple, luminous rule ; that those subjects only should be offered which release the child's latent enthusiasm : that Greek is more valuable than book-keeping in this respect, merely because it contains those elements of idealism and magnanimity which do so unfold the eager wings of youth ; that Greek itself is usually spoiled because it is presented as disci- pline rather than as opportunity for admiration ; and finally, that, after all, the poetic tradition of one's own language and race is by far the best educational agency. Enthusiasm and admiration once aroused, the rest is easy, and the vocational training obligatory to all social existence will be eagerly undergone as the necessary means to a highly -desirable end. The acquisition of detail to one really in love with his subject is as rapid and easy as the study of topography by an aviator. While the men beneath him are stopped by every hedge and lost in every wood, he sails freely, magnificently on, picking out a A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 41 river here and a mountain there, making serene use of details instead of being confused and baffled by them. Jurisprudence, therefore, is a passion to the born lawyer, just as metre is a divine sport to the born poet ; though if we were to believe the ordinary advocate and scribbler, these are worse confounded than the streets of Constantinople. Facility in the use of detail is entirely a matter of perspective, which in turn is a matter of enthusiasm and ambition derived from natural fitness. This enthusiasm in himself, he knows, had contributed a romance and magic to the obscurest points of his profession; and that without such spontaneity he would never have risen beyond a clerkship. The music and gymnastics of the Greeks, accordingly, assume not only an idealistic, but a very practical value in human life, and your neighbour passes a brick school-house with a shudder as from a prison. Reaching these conclusions, your neighbour feels a strong impulse to stop people on the street and tell them. He feels like the Columbus of some new, fallow, opulent America, and the joy of discovery is so intense that he is eager to give away square miles of virgin soil to all who stand in need. He looks about and undertakes an 42 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION investigation into the whole problem of education. It makes no difference to this purpose that his daughter recovered after a year in the calm, renewing country the iron of wrong has entered his soul, he sees the outer darkness of inefficiency and failure crouching imminent beyond the world's small candle of intellectual manhood and womanhood, and his public life henceforth is con- secrated to its ultimate extinction. But he enters upon the same round of discoveries concerning the propagation of a superior ideal in education that has already daunted your first neighbour concerning the propagation of a superior ideal in economics, so that hereafter, their problems being identical, we can identify the two cases and con- sider them as one. From whatever angle, obviously, the earnest man enters this labyrinth, from whatever class or creed he starts, whatever purpose he has in view, he is certain to learn about society the facts already mentioned, with as many more as his patience and capacity entitle him to receive. Like the owner of a very large tree in a very small garden, he finds the roots of his cherished problem running out into many other people's territory. He digs about the trunk first, follow- A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATU11E 43 ing each tap-root in its sinuous and extensive progress, but in every instance he is stopped short by his own limiting wall. Beyond this he cannot go. And while the tree is slowly blasted before his eyes he wonders which of his neighbours, or what process, intentional or otherwise, has poisoned the plant. All the societies founded, like his own, for social amelioration, raise their boundaries and confine him on every side. It might be possible, he sees, by some extraordinary general convention, to arrange a constructive compromise whereby these walls could be pro- vided with a friendly gate of mutual intercourse and co-operation; but two walls loom up over these lower barriers which seem for ever and inevitably fixed the frontiers of nations and the hostile antagonism of religions. By the time that he has worked out to these conclusions, your neighbour knows too clearly that any one nation and any one religion represents too small a section of humanity in which or by which to effect permanent social reform. The roots of all the important human problems, in short, are hope- lessly intertwined and involved without respect to any religious, racial, or national boundary- line. By this time, if he is anything more than 44 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION a village official excited about the speed of auto- mobiles, he has come to regard the nations, the races, and the religions as so many adjacent gardens grouped about the single tree of human- ity. We are all neighbours, he knows, and the cultivation of each soil-area has its direct in- fluence upon that tree. Some of us are advanced and conscientious ; some of us are conscientious but ignorant ; some are both ignorant and selfish ; some have already begun to dream of a nobler tree and fairer fruit ; others scarcely realize that there is a tree, but lie drowsily in the sun, eating such fruit as falls, contented when it chances to be wholesome, and disgustingly, pusillanimously sick when the fruit is bad. Fixed as he must be in his own particular social latitude and longitude, your neighbour has nevertheless a new and abiding sense of human things. Society seems to him like a vast painting worked out by thousands of artists, to each of whom a small section of the canvas has been given without order of merit. If there was any original cartoon, moreover, this has appar- ently been lost or destroyed, and consequently each artist has been compelled to fill his allotted space according to his own ideas. As the natural A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 45 result, the whole canvas represents an ordered confusion, a mathematical distortion, a divine inconsequence that strikes the beholder like the supreme triumph of inspired nightmare. Of course, if one looks at only one space at a time, concentrating upon the successive environments one by one, he always finds more or less harmony and perfection. If you speak of confusion, he takes you close to the painting, points out his favourite section, and refutes you by a triumphant silence ; if you suggest distortion, inconsequence, he will offer to take you over the whole canvas, proving by a profound critical study of each section the highly admirable finality of Art. Objecting to this method, however, and request- ing him to step back and view the work as a whole, it is very likely that he will consider you a vandal capable of stealing Mona Lisa, or a harmless fool who really never deserved a critic's serious attention. But we have not thought, suffered, or dreamed our way to this point to accept the inconclusive conclusion of the environment-mind. We cherish the fearless, unchanging faith that, if order is not now an attribute of human society, it is not in- herently impossible to it ; if there is not now an 46 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION international equity, an inter-religious fraternity, the human race has received no divine fiat making them for ever unattainable. It was not written on the stone tablets, nor spoken from the Mount of Olives. Nor did Buddha authorize any such negation in the philosophic East. By the manhood and womanhood within us inter- preting human life according to its own creative instinct, we insist that there must be some true perspective for the social picture ; some point of view from which these numberless self-contradic- tory, self-stultifying scenes already melt into a perfect unity ; and that unity, we know, shall not only contain a holy beauty, yet unimaginable, all its own, but by some easy and natural meta- physics will endow each of its component parts with a vigour and delight totally unfelt by those who see the parts unrelated to the whole. This we know, and in our faith exulting beyond the reach of discouragement, we seek this unique point of view, this centre of unity, throughout the length and breadth of the world. Some experience at least, some emotional reaction corresponding to this is responsible for the Socialistic standpoint. It is a point of view far more inclusive than that of religion as A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 47 traditionally conceived, and certainly more firmly based. It is the bitter or contemptuous foe of orthodoxy, and its demands are too forceful to be set aside, just as its influence is too general to be resisted. To be quite beyond discouragement, however, we must either have attained some positive bliss which dares laugh at reason, or have acquired some truth which no criticism can ever refute or impair. Unreasonable happiness is a state we have no desire to realize. Our happiness must be more reasonable than reason itself, or we want none of it. As all social evils have a known cause which science and law conceivably can remedy, we need only put into operation the requisite agencies, and slowly but surely the whole demoralizing tangle will straighten out. Have we evolved a saving truth, then, which is inexpugnable to experience ? The method of this study, as already expressed, consists in comparing two diametrically opposite values in order to derive a third value reconciling and including both. No philosophy can be ex- ploded or modified until it has been permitted complete opportunity of self-expression. As long as either contestant in a debate retains part of his argument unformulated he holds open a 48 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION road to victory; but with the whole argument once delivered he has no further opportunity of dealing with new facts, and has very likely thus succeeded in controverting his own conclusions. Passing to the other point of view, therefore, does the religious type agree with the ideas just expressed ? Is he daunted or baffled by them ? Not in the least. He says that this philosophy begins at the wrong end of life. He says that man is not a helpless slave to material environ- ment, not a lump of clay to be thumped and moulded by the blind potters of the world ; but by divine right the creator of his own destiny, endowed with will-power to resist all material and physical catastrophe, just as he possesses an instinctive faith which, when called upon, can elevate him above the reach of failure and pain. He says that by laying our emphasis upon environment we stupify our power to conquer environment, and by transferring our efforts from the soul to society we weaken that inward spiritual activity which alone makes life worth living, whose development, in fact, is the end and aim of existence. While your Socialists and agitators, he continues, are groaning about poverty, consider the stern, sweet triumph many A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 49 a weak man and woman has already achieved in far more terrible adversity. Which is more admirable ? One has only to examine the results gained by so much restless running to and fro. What is the end of it all ? The more that is given the poor, the more they want. Gaining an unexpected bodily comfort, they have lost their old simplicity and poise. Gain- ing a little of this world, they have lost their own souls ! And the others too, the rich and educated, are suffering from the same disease. We are all worshipping at the strange shrines of physical and intellectual perfection ; we raise an altar to the unknown god whom we might as well openly call the God of Pleasure while we desert the ark of the covenant and raise impious hands against the Crucified. We are winding a rope of sand ; we are writing our eternal names in water. We stoop over the world's dirty carpet, pulling out the rotten threads and weaving with them a new rug. How can the new rug be any better than the old ? That which was dark in the former will be dark in the latter ; what was red will be red, and what was pure white shall ever be pure all the strands inherently unchanged by the mere process of 4 50 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION changing the design in which they are tied. A weak man must be weak however buttressed about by social regulations ; a vicious woman will be vicious under democracy as under monarchy ; while a pure soul can remain un- dismayed in the lowest circle of blasphemous hell the soul of man under Socialism, in short, will continue to be the soul of man. But must we be discouraged ? Must we resign ourselves to an alternative either hopeless or unworthy ? No! And the religious man speaks from the great faith within him No ! We must simply and utterly begin at the other end of life. We must begin with the soul itself, and discipline it to acquire or reveal powers over which the world has no control. We must admit no compromise between spirit and matter, between the man and his environment. Once accepting Christ's revelation of the soul's supreme sufficiency and the world's supreme helplessness, once con- secrating ourselves to the inward life of God, and all our fears and vexations will cease. Aye, the world shall have no more authority over us, but this life will take its proper proportion in the great eternal scheme as the training school of souls, the battleground of right and wrong prep- A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 51 aration, not finality ; possibility, not consumma- tion. In a word, he concludes with the lingering smile of wisdom in a word, that which makes the social ideal both impossible and unworthy of man is men is human nature. The force of his conviction brings us his point of view. Have we indeed begun at the wrong end of life ? Are we really beyond discourage- ment ? For already this philosophy has thrown its disturbing shadow across our steady resolve. We have met this revolutionizing factor before, this human nature. In our efforts toward social well-being, we have been thrown back time after time by exasperating and apparently fatal ques- tions of personality and disposition. We have encountered a certain cross-grained contrariness in men which resisted our sharpest saw of pro- gress. Our combination of ideas could be relied upon, but our association of men soon scattered like autumn leaves. The ideal remained firm as Gibraltar, but the individual followers dashed blindly against one another in the stormy Mediterranean of prejudice and jealousy below. The religious man, therefore, merely gives a definite form to a tendency we ourselves have often observed in society ; has only allied to an 52 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION ancient ecclesiastical tradition an undoubted instinct of the human soul. Certainly, if this everyday flux of passions truly represents human nature, we shall find it difficult to resist the progress of that militant tradition across our lives and institutions. We shall find it impos- sible not to exchange, and gladly exchange, our troubled vision of men for the calm purpose of God. Little by little, as we follow our own souls toward divine perfection, we shall first relax, then release, our grasp upon outward things ; and as eternity develops within us, like a new body to cast off the old flesh, a new mind to cast off the old thoughts, we shall hear the mingled curses and cries of humanity as reveal- ing their passion for inward liberty, not political equality, for spiritual intensity, not material opportunity ; and full of our own new happiness and peace we shall leave the untroubled, glory- filled cathedral of meditation for the roaring, brutal market, bearing a simple story of love, meekness, and sacrifice as balm for the broken heart and the aching mind of man. Here, then, we have the religious point of view. Comparing it with the point of view previously expressed, we see that neither is A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 53 wrong in the sense that it can be successfully denied or neglected. But, on the other hand, both are wrong in the sense that both are so narrow that they exclude as much truth as they contain. It is the excluded truth that finally damns a system, not the admixture of error the system contains ; and from now on we must endeavour to break down the fatal opposition that sunders religion and social science. Will Christianity absorb Socialism ? Will Socialism (I use the term in the broadest sense as meaning the whole movement for social amelioration) will Socialism make use of Christianity ? What will be the character of the new thing, ^Christian- Socialism " (or " Socialized-Christianity ") ? The common point at which they are compelled to meet is human nature. If human nature were what the saints and confessors say it is, and be no more than they say it is, we should have to reconcile ourselves to the eternal opposition of world and spirit, with life necessarily unhappy, and its only hope in the next world. Fortunately for us, the orthodox definitions of human nature are strict, narrow, and precise. The Church has a definite psychology, while the modern psycho- logy only exists as the unformulated impressions 54 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION of most men and women. It has not yet brought forth a St. Augustine or Thomas a Kempis to focus these various impressions into one intense personal experience, and we accord- ingly possess no authoritative psychology to oppose to the orthodox definitions of human nature. It will go hard with us, however, if, as living men and women, we cannot evolve a few definitions more acceptable to our reason. For ourselves, we are conscious of helpless good far more than triumphant evil, and unsuccessful impulses toward self-control or self-expression, far more than desperate but voluntary compacts with hell. What is human nature viewed in the clear light of facts and events ? Is it an element for ever fixed in relation to its own resources of good and evil, or is it a substance socially capable of gradual refinement and purification ? If only a blunt yes or no be permitted, we should abso- lutely accept the former estimate, and resolutely reject the latter. That is, in seeking for the ultimate point of responsibility, we had better locate it, at all costs, in the individual soul rather than in the environment. For we can find the same dreary types of sin and shame repeated A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 55 throughout every social arrangement from the beginning of time. We can find, likewise, the same inspiring types of truth, courage, and fidelity exemplified in every conceivable political and ecclesiastical order. The constructive mother and the destructive harlot dwell side by side in London as they dwelt in Athens ; the miser and his brother the spendthrift save and scatter our paper currency as they used the shell money of the Indians. There is apparently no spiritual improvement in society as a whole, but only one same inevitable and fateful drama which Every- man must play to the end. For, could we effect a real social amelioration, we should eliminate the destructive and vicious types, retaining only the superior stock. We ourselves, in other words, should be appreciably better than our grandparents, which we certainly are not. But now I suddenly recollect my objection to the historical estimate of life. I suddenly recollect that all human existence has been created in the form of individual men and women ; and that our only fair test of life and standard of the universe is the experience of each man and woman, taken separately, as a series of personal impressions last- ing, with varying degrees of intensity, from birth 56 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION to death. I refused to be duped by the universal deception we practise upon ourselves, of looking out from our personal experience to some institu- tion such as Church or State, and trying to identify our own helplessness with its strength, our own shame with its glory. Yet the first time that the historical method was employed as an argument I was temporarily convinced ! No, instead of watching the reappearance of any type, good or bad, in the interminable pro- cess of the generations, let us rather take one type and follow its inward experience and fate. We can choose any type or any number of types, provided always that we take them one at a time and study life through their own eyes. In this way we shall learn human nature as it actually exists in men and women like ourselves, not as it is classified in the historical museum. Take the harlot type. Emotional or economic necessity compels a woman to give or sell herself to men. As we see her, she is a creature sunken or sinking into the slough of physical and mental ruin, feverish or dull, desperate or apathetic, but always approaching one terrible climax of dis- solution. We might ask what she had been as a child ; whether the harlot bears any distinctive A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 57 temperamental indication by which she can be recognized as potentially and necessarily a harlot, even before actually becoming such. It would be a reckless thinker who stated that there is any indication of the kind. Among a thousand ten-year-old girls which, or how many, will become harlots ? We can agree, however, that temptation will come to all, whether as unreason- able emotion or compelling want, and that only those few who cannot resist their particular temptation will become harlots ; the great majority will attain an unchallenged womanhood. Comparing the former with each other, we may find some common temperamental likeness suggested between them all, an emotional intensity bordering upon hysteria, an emotional apathy approaching insensibility, some funda- mental perversion of reason and will, or some anaemia of mind and nerve. Can we accept any or all of these conditions as unfailing indices of prostitution ? If we do construct an index, we must be prepared to find that every other woman among the thousand will be indicated by it to a greater or less degree. We will also find among the acknowledged prostitutes some who scarcely respond to our scale, but by the un- 58 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION answerable authority of nature were intended to be happy wives and mothers. What con- tradiction is this? The reply is easy: that society brings a greater pressure to bear upon some women than upon others ; that many respected women would have succumbed had they been exposed to the same early environ- ment as the unfortunates ; and, conversely, that many and many a prostitute would have realized a useful and happy life had she received a little more sympathetic attention or a little more wholesome food. The "human nature" of women, then, while differing according to personality, sustains a general likeness which authorizes us to derive a few conclusions. We may compare it to an elastic, all-pervading sub- stance continually subject to strain, which by virtue of its strength and elasticity can resist terrific pressure, but after receiving a certain amount will recover no more, and will break or assume a new, distorted form. That is, there exists a temptation-point for womanhood, a com- bination of poverty, loneliness, discouragement, and desperation at which the individual must choose between death and shame. I think that such an analysis, far from making anyone think A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 59 worse of human nature, fills one with reverent awe, darkened by an overshadowing sorrow that such a point should be allowed to exist. If only a partial vindication for the individual woman (yet vindicatory to an extent known only to the few devoted and fearless students of the subject), yet it is an absolute and eternal conviction of society itself. It should create a deep sympathy between women that earnest, constructive sympathy which surviving soldiers feel for the fallen, knowing that in such a hell of bullets some must perish, and grateful that it was not themselves. I have selected one type, and suggested the resemblances by which it is knit close to the rest of humanity. In choosing the harlot type, moreover, I have deliberately taken the form of temptation which, while as common as any and far severer than most, is nevertheless yielded to proportionately less than any other. I have deliberately taken the one so-called vicious type whose viciousness to become operative must stifle the most powerful natural instinct, and, having done so, receives the least compensation in return. In the compulsory sterilization of one woman's passion the whole world is blackly 60 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION damned. But I have not yet touched the heart of this matter, I have only cut a cross-section of human nature, as it were, and pointed out the fact that all its rings are concentric. I have only suggested a similarity between people of different and even antagonistic temperament, but I shall now reveal a tremendous dis- similarity, a sheer self-estrangement which exists in every individual cleaving him from himself like daylight and darkness, or like east and west. Who was that proud and hateful man, that selfish ruffian round whom suddenly there shined a light from heaven, and who after three days of fasting and blindness received a new sight and a new nature ? The question carries us to the very watch-tower of human nature ; it carries us to religion and Christ ; the answer, that it was the Saul who became St. Paul, brings Christ and religion directly to us. For there could be no better proof of Saul's desperate and vicious nature than that even after conversion he was feared by the Apostles ; there can be no better proof of Paul's spiritual nature than his own later life and influence. In seeking for this religious or spiritual nature as a fact in our human life, I need not confine myself to the A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 61 strange environment Christ created about Him- self in the men and women He passed among, for our civilization has never lacked saints and mystics, even in its darkest hour. We can dis- cover this saintship and mysticism to-day, often in those who have no knowledge of its ecclesias- tical relation. But no man need accept for the purposes of this discussion a condition of being in which other men have lived and are living to-day. He need only look within himself and acknowledge the presence of two natures that which he is, and that which he would sometimes prefer to be. He knows more about the first than the second ; it is thrust upon him, happily or unhappily, every day of his life, and seems as much more present and actual and inevitable as his own home seems more present, actual, and inevitable than the sunset hidden behind a city's smoke. We need push the question no further : it is enough to admit that ordinary human nature is not a unity, but a division ; not a simple, controllable substance, but two sub- stances, each complex, interwoven and involved- one firm and unchangeable, like the trees in a forest ; the other soft and ephemeral, like the light mist which the wind blows among the trees. 62 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION Though most of us are thus divided, some men have been united. Without discussing the how and why of the fact, let us merely examine these men after this inward unity, and learn some idea of the new substance, so to speak, which in them human nature has suddenly become. Undoubtedly the first unusual attribute we notice is joy, and, not like our happiness, derived from unstable, ever-passing combinations of health, environment, self-gratification, success, and the weather riot at all like this, but some- thing assured, self-deriving, or self-renewing, independent of all outward circumstances, and as integral a part of the possessor as his heart or brain. How can this be ? How can it be that whereas with our happiness familiarity breeds contempt and taste leads to repletion and antipathy, this other happiness falls in love with itself, as it were, and by self-consumption is ever increased and intensified? Yet there is no doubt of its existence, no question of its actual possession of these strange qualities. What other attribute can we discover in such men? Why surely, a faith and stedfastness unalterable, and a burning desire to influence the personal lives of other men. Now, are we going to resign A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 63 ourselves for ever to our own unsatisfactory nature, or rather natures, while witness to so desirable a nature in men originally no better than we? At least, let us form a working hypothesis and then apply it to our own case. In some people there seems to exist, or be acquired, another set of organs, a different centre of activity. A spiritual nature seems to be born within them like a butterfly in its chrysalis, as different from mind as mind is from body ; and this does not always come about through the in- fluence of a greater personality, but through the man's own desire to reconcile the two natures within him. From all evidence and from our own experience or instinct we are convinced that spirituality comes from our ideal and unattained self. But is it merely a superior physical health or a clearer intelligence ? Is it one or both of these, or something quite new and dissimilar ? As an athlete might cast a glance of pity on the invalid sitting motionless in the sun, or as the eager scholar might turn unhappily away from a dullard having no thought of the universe beyond his little environment and his brief day like these, but with far deeper and broader compassion the spiritual man sees the weakness and blindness 64 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION of the spiritually invalid. To him, his spirituality is the source of all his existence. It courses through his body like a torrent of warm, vitaliz- ing blood, rousing the tired heart to youthful exuberance and his limbs to the lightness of a fawn. It steeps his mind like the sun in Italian gardens, drawing a radiant colour and lingering perfume from each thought, and inspiring emotions jubilant as the thrush among the trees. He knows and he knows by the same unanswer- able conviction of the athlete who knows his own strength, or the scholar who knows his own intelligence he knows that he has come into possession of a new nature. He knows that this new nature, this spiritual self, far from being the reaction from clean blood or clear brain, is the source of their richest energy. He feels his sluggish, unhealing blood demanding new, vital nourishment, his tired brain suddenly calling for more and profounder materials. A new centre of sensation has developed within him, at once swifter and more responsive than the old the conflux of mind and body with a new current. The joy that he had in physical activity becomes tenfold, as if he were hurrying to greet a friend ; and his thoughts grow passionately interesting, A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 65 each one the key to a supreme secret. But deeper and stronger dawns the realization that body and mind have found their purpose and their sustenance. The body carries him from bower to bower of Nature's paradise ; the mind brings him glimpse after glimpse of a holy ador- able Presence. But is this new activity accidental, intermittent, contingent ? Far otherwise. He knows at last that always, even in his most painful or unhappy day, it had been spirit which he had really prayed for, not health, will-power, or good fortune. In so far as spirit had been present within him, he had ever found comfort in weakness and courage in despair ; but to the degree that soul had been wanting, stifled by the ignorant or unready mind, he had been both hopeless and condemned, judged and punished. But now, attaining spiritual activity, his life has become one strong current of power, joy and accomplishment. Trials ? misfortunes ? so many wheels the river turns as it flows, undelayed and unweakened. Sickness ? death ? Oh yes, but the bird sings elsewhere when this wood hears it no more the poet's creative power seizes upon a new subject when the completed poem has been sent abroad. 5 66 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION Had Shakespeare felt this radiant, self-assured spirituality, he would have left us great impulses toward happiness instead of eternal phrases of regret; had Milton's faith been undarkened by the perverted moral consciousness of his gener- ation, we should have looked upon no " Paradise Lost," but the primal Eden sown eternally for all men and women ; and Napoleon would have bequeathed no Waterloo to breed the all-poison- ing snake of modern armed peace, but a united, inspired France, like another Athens, to inflame the world. One might grant so much yet remain un- satisfied. The acquisition of this spiritual nature may be dependent on temperament ? Practical, everyday people are excluded ? Only he is ex- cluded from this attainment who never felt a different nature hovering over his common nature, a new desire bursting like a strange flower within the garden of his dreams. For the soul's pre- dominance acts like the authority of a captain, bringing obedience to many rebellious impulses and unity to many discordant powers. It gathers all the physical and intellectual faculties into a beautiful, efficient synthesis. It realizes all the occasional aspirations by one symmetrical, poised A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 67 faith. It makes every personality a rare posses- sion, valuable to the world. The fisherman's simplicity it makes Peter's reverence, and from Saul's rancour it moulds the ardour of Paul. It removes the cause for jealousy and hate by trans- ferring desire from the flux of people and things to the steadfast mountain of holiness. Personal- ity becomes a delight, which had been a burden ; individuality becomes a treasure, which had been a curse. But, if attainable, is spirituality socially desir- able ? Does it not deprive humanity of a man, and the State of a citizen ? Can a man serve two masters ? This indictment is apparently warranted by the world's experience with holy men and mystics. Spiritual activity has driven men into deserts and monasteries. And the men of greatest faith have ever attempted to turn our minds from this world to another. Once again, however, history will provide argument for one side as potent as for the other, and we must here trust to our own increasing knowledge of the soul. Yet what inner truth or instinct can reconcile the useless self-torture of St. Simon with the devoted public ministry of St. Catherine of Siena ? Does the spiritual life effect one temperament 68 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION one way, but another temperament the opposite way ? Surely not ! And by comparing the activity of the two natures within ourselves, we can interpret every apparent contradiction and exception. The brutish hermit, the fierce ascetic, have been deceived by the overwhelming moral perversity of their age, or (which is more likely), have not really attained the spiritual life. For the desire for this inward sanctification and happiness will drive to madness or to ethical crime those who are aware of their soul's possi- bility, but who are tortured by their apparent inability to realize it. Ignorant of the true method of operation, they gladly scarify the physical and intellectual being in the conviction that passion and reason negate or destroy spirituality. Should spirituality come to them, by reason of their intense desire and despite their desperate error, they realize too late how uselessly they have deprived the soul of its faithful servants and messengers. But even at such cost they never regret. On the other hand, when spiritual activity is fully awakened in a man, he approaches society more closely, and serves the State with greater zeal. He finds his true happiness in service, and will not solicit from men the recom- A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 69 pense already abundantly bestowed by his Creator. He does not crave celibacy nor require it, but if the divine accident of love reveal to him the mate his psychic and physical incompleteness has awaited, he discovers in marriage the primal mystery and sacrament of life. Nakedness and innocence become identified as one indivisible quality, and love the mutual rendering of one divine gift. The flaming sword of shame lowers for these two ; they find Eden everywhere about them, and in parenthood restore to their children the golden age. And stronger even than this sacrament is the sacrament of the forgiveness of sin. All the long-festering centres of hateful, shameful thought and memory, spreading a subtle and paralyzing infection through his consciousness, instantly heal and disappear. The mind receives them back into its own cosmic infinity, and the individual returns to sin no more. Then, as a strong man recovering from wasting sickness feels returning his rightful mastery over the limbs ; as, gradually but surely, his body loses its terrible weight, and he no longer need exert a reluctant will-power to raise head and arm ; so increase of spiritual health gives complete control over the moral nature. The so- 70 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION called virtues, once onerous, are become easy ; morality reveals itself as opportunity, not duty. Spiritualized human nature expresses its natural power and joy through the virtues, as the athlete expresses his strength by means of exercises and games. Each virtue and grace of life becomes in its turn a means for self-expression goblets in which the soul may pour its rare and fragrant wine. The grimly conscientious and the sceptical have probably long ago thrown down this exult- ing page ; yet if curiosity, not approval, retain their attention still, I shall gladly answer the indignant question that now breaks from their lips. If this be true, they say (it should be remarked that puritan and freethinker put the same question), if such joy, steadfastness, and power can be derived from a spiritual activity free to all men and women, how about them? And they point to the passing crowd. Yes, I repeat, what about them ? Are they essentially different from those multitudes who heard Christ, and believed, and went on their way rejoicing ? Have they less inherent capacity for spiritual living? I firmly believe that they possess far more. Then why do they not believe A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 71 also, and rejoice ? The reply is easier and simpler than might be thought possible. We have only to pause, however, each in his own place, and for a moment seriously consider the social order, its ideal, its operation, and its effect upon the individual. But since, if we consider it from no special point of view, with no special inquiry in our minds, the world will seem merely a great spectacle which, including all kinds and conditions, apparently emphasizes no particular kind and condition, nor apparently authorizes any deduction from facts which cannot be sterilized by a diametrically opposite deduction, also from facts since this is so, let us deliber- ately take one point of view for our outlook upon society, and let us formulate one particular ques- tion which society must answer. Our point of view must be supremely vital ; therefore it shall be that of the relations of the individual, who- ever and wherever he is the point of view, that is, of you and me and every other man and woman taken separately and one at a time. This is the only natural point of view, since it is the one that life itself thrusts equally upon all. But our question, also, must be supremely and universally important ; therefore it shall be this : 72 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION What effect does the present social order inherently and inevitably have upon our spiritual develop- ment ? Spiritual attainment, as we have seen, consists in the transference of our centre of consciousness from one being this common being which others think of when they think of us to another being ; that ideal nature we sometimes think of all alone, when our solitude is inspired by some uncontrollable passion of love or sorrow. It consists in hurling ourselves across an inward chasm and becoming different men. It consists in effecting a change in ourselves so radical and permanent, that after the change we can look upon our former nature as the bird looks upon the broken shell from which it came, as the butterfly looks upon the chrysalis to which it need never return. But society tolerates no such changes. Whatever the optimist say, or the glorious exceptions seem to prove, our social arrangement is inherently, inevitably and alto- gether opposed to the spiritualization of human nature. Its opposition may not be conscious or intentional, but none the less it is diabolically effective. People, as men and women, may not hinder, but encourage us to attain our ideal A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 73 nature ; but people as society fling over every soul the confining chains of duty and habit, even as the gods bound the aspiring Titon (" Fore- sight ") to the sheer rock and laid open his breast to the vulture. Spiritual attainment is not the mysterious nor tremendously difficult task its rareness would seem to imply. It is not so difficult as the development of an athlete from the ordinary lover of sports ; it is not so mysterious as the development of a scholar from the ordinary lover of knowledge. The process is simpler and swifter, its apparatus less expensive. Men have only to realize that the tidal wave of power rolling momentarily across their char- acters in the presence of a great event like battle, a great personality like the orator, a great emo- tion like love that this power is not lent to them by the outward event or personality, but is the effect of their own spiritual nature recog- nizing its own attributes in the mirror of the world's glory. It is they who bring greatness to the event, not the event which brings greatness to them. They must realize, moreover, that such power, steadfastness, and joy is a transient climax, like the crest of the wave, only when registered and considered by their lesser nature ; 74 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION but that when registered by their spiritual nature it is known to be an attribute of self, and there- fore a permanent state of being. One has only to go back and recollect as clearly as possible what passed through his mind at such a time ; he will perceive, like a faded map, a character totally superior to his present character, a world of labour and men quite different from this world. That map or chart of the spiritual self is faded now, and it will continue to grow dimmer and less believable as he leaves the great crisis behind ; yet in that hour it was outlined more clearly than the constellations, in figures more intensely brilliant than the sun. Every con- scious being can draw from his own memory at least one impulse which, if followed, would have led him to the spiritual life. No human soil is so unhallowed that it does not contain at least one fragment of self-perfection. By this frag- ment, though it be broken and marred like the statue of some ancient divinity, the god is re- covered to the imagination and the will. But what blots out the map of attainment ? what barbarism overthrows the shining acropolis of perfection ? Once more I seriously desire every man to answer for himself, out of his own A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 75 convincing experience. Let him return to the momentary vision and impulse and learn what malignant demon of commonplaceness stole it, like a sunrise, for ever away. He will perceive that some social duty too quickly intervened between himself and his creative passion, dis- tracting him into attention of outward things, and that he saw nothing in these outward things to correspond to the necessity of his dream, so that gradually he came to doubt its existence or at least its practicability. But if he be more tenacious, if he will not yield so easily to outer influence, he will also perceive that society has made no available provision for this new nature, either to produce or develop it, and hence he, too, like the iron heated and then neglected by the smith, will cool once more, his form and temper unchanged. Here, indeed, lies the dark secret of the world's unhappiness : that in neglecting to provide for the soul, society has not made the mistake of the jeweller who substitutes alloy for gold ; it makes the far more consequential error of the sword-maker who tries to fashion a blade of cold iron. The exceptional personality, more- over, who derives his course of action from inner necessity and not from outer suggestion, on 76 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION cherishing this new, mysterious impulse and releasing its activity to its culmination in the successful spiritualization of his nature, he must then undergo the ultimate tragedy, the Golgotha of the religious life, realizing at last that our social order, the prematurely-lauded arrangement of a " free Church within a free State," effectively prevents him from expressing himself adequately in terms of service to his fellow-men. Here, in fact, lies the truth excluded by the religious psychology. It has not at all taken into account the soul's need of self-expression through mind and body, with all the social com- plications which that involves. The Christian psy- chology, in other words, takes it for granted that the soul expresses itself only through prayer and praise, or through other means equally personal and innocuous. It is only when the modern Christian, who differs from the monk and priest by his sense of human fellowship it is only when the modern Christian attempts to carry his vision into practice, that he sees the fatal error religion has made in permitting or compelling society to develop its governmental activity apart from its spiritual life. For government, by which I mean the social structure in its broadest sense, A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 77 must be realized to be the collective expression of human souls ; and as such to possess an all- powerful influence over our spiritual life. Human nature, then, is too complex and inclusive a substance to be independent either of religion or social science. In the daily experience of every man and woman they meet and blend, though society itself is organized upon their intense hostility. But since our human nature can, and must, reconcile them, it will not be long before society reconciles them also. Part III., accord- ingly, will study this latter aspect of the problem, and show how society is already instinctively attempting to unite them, with an inquiry into the nature of the social structure that will result. PART III THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS Ill OUR nature, broadly speaking, maintains social self-expression through two different sets of institutions the Church and the State. While Church and State truly represent the ideas of their members ; while they truly are a projection of our natures upon the material world, like a well- fitting garment, they are either unfelt or felt only as a source of comfort and pleasure. Grounding ourselves upon the firm basis that Church and State no longer fulfil our needs and desires, we can readily perceive wherein each one is a misfit, and how both are rapidly altering so as to conform to that mould and pattern every man bears within himself. Of our social existence, we have stated one unchallenged fact, that it is a constant defence against personal calamity a truceless warfare and a peril unremoved. Every man and woman, in every environment, at all times, banquets (or 81 6 82 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION starves !) at the world's table under an impend- ings word. Virtue secures a man only partial immunity ; health and wealth are mighty shields that protect only a little of one's individual integrity. With a rapidity that leaves us in- different, a multiformity that leaves us resigned, disaster and misfortune sickness, poverty, grief, helplessness make out their daily bulletins of defeat ; and we, the lucky survivors of to-day's proscription, may well wonder what sentence the morrow will pass upon our lives. We know too clearly that it is neither our virtue nor intelligence which has given us such respite, for more admir- able unselfishness, courage, and wit fell among the earliest victims. No. Standing one story higher than the superstitious or passionate mob which attributes every catastrophe either to implacable fate or to some wanton human tyrant now propitiating Moloch, now beheading King Louis standing one story higher than the crowded streets, we have long ago discovered the comparative impotence of any individual to accomplish good, and the comparative innocence of any individual in accomplishing evil. We see that evil and misfortune are inherent in the inequable social structure ; that the streets of THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 83 our political and economic order are too narrow and tortuous to pass the human population without crushing many, without bruising, dis- turbing, and endangering all. Slowly, like the features of a landscape under a lifting fog, appear to us the true direction and extent of this peril to which we are exposed, and, for a fundamental axiom of social life, a law applicable to every environment and to any age, we derive this statement of fact : the danger to which any man is exposed at any moment is a danger to all men at that same point of time. What does this solemn warning mean ? It does not at all mean that when one house catches fire the whole town must be consumed ; it does not at all mean that when an epidemic breaks out, or a financial panic ensues, every citizen will be infected or every business destroyed. But it means this : that the possibility of fire lurks over every building alike, and that just previous to any conflagration, all owners share potentially in the risk of loss the fact which every insurance company is firmly established upon ; and it means that when typhoid poisons the public water or milk supply, your family and your neighbours suffer the same peril of death. 84 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION If he dies, you have no special merit, and have survived this ordeal, perhaps, only to sink with an overloaded pleasure steamer the next summer, or perish in a railroad accident the next week. That is its meaning, and the proof of the axiom can be further derived by every man from his own experience. But immediately upon stating the law and taking its implication to our own existence immediately upon recog- nizing and naming the implacable foe by which all men are threatened ruin a new hope, sane and sweet and strong as a May morning, rises over this desperate darkness and uncovers a garden in the very arctics of seedless snow. For the fact that one fire no longer involves a city implies that a successful system of prevention has been devised. It implies, moreover, that the system is public and free, never withheld from any man's need on account of his poverty, his politics, his race, or his morals. It implies that in this matter of fire men recognize and act upon the fact that the safety of all is the safety of each. The fanatic cannot prevent the fire department from saving an atheist's office building, nor the Conservative divert the water from the Liberal's barn. Above all, they would THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 85 not if they could. Likewise, the fact than an epidemic no longer destroys the entire popula- tion argues an active scientific system of pre- vention and cure. A few cases reveal the disease ; the alarm goes abroad, our modern machinery of hygiene is put into operation, and beyond a few victims the epidemic has no power to interrupt our social continuity. This fact in itself is too commonplace to arouse our enthusiasm or gratitude now ; yet it suggests much, for even as I write I can turn to my window and see the towers of a medieval city, where, in the year 1348, the plague carried off nearly 80,000 members of a population number- ing not more than 100,000 souls. The modern man, I am sure, if confronted by a similar catastrophe, would prefer death to survival with such a melancholy or desperate fraction. Life would become too terrible, far more contemptible than death, given or withdrawn, nourished or denied, according to a blind chance, with all God's privilege of existence apparently subject to a fortune more hateful than the gambler's wheel. But our comparative immunity from epidemic supplies the same deduction as our comparative immunity from fire that society 86 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION has come to acknowledge and act upon the fact that the safety of all is the safety of each. I have chosen obvious examples ; I might as easily have selected cases of intellectual or spiritual misfortune. The shaft of this inquiry can be driven into a man's most personal and (so-considered) private relations, those relations even more important in their effect upon efficiency and well-being than his economic and political relations; and each typical example, on every plane of human existence, would repeat and further emphasize the inexpugnable social law: that the danger to one is a danger for all; that the only safety effectual for the one is the safety available for all. For there are many terrible misfortunes happening but seldom, that are seldom mentioned when known, which exist in the structure of society, nevertheless, like a virulent serpent hidden under a stone. Are there women to whom marriage brings an indescribable horror of agony and shame ; children to whom life can only mean the slow punishment for crimes committed long before they were born ? Are there productive intelli- gences neglected, willing labourers denied work ? Are there children overworked or starved into THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 87 viciousness by nasty food ? Is there anywhere, in any person's experience, one damnable social injustice or calamity, then as surely as the one sun lights us all it threatens you and me. Every man and woman ought at least once to face squarely and intelligently the more apparent facts about our social life. Every fool's paradise of shallow optimism, ignorance, or sloth, will be destroyed and its dwellers thrust miserably forth. And since this is so, we discover a new relation- ship binding every man to his fellows. It can best be explained by analogy. The human body is equipped with nerves in every part, whose function is to register every danger to the central intelligence. The organism as a whole depends upon each minutest nerve for its information about environment. The finger- tip in detecting heat and cold may be the means of saving the body. It is not a matter of the relative importance of finger-tip and brain ; it is a matter of their absolute interdependence. The greatest harm that the eye could bring to the body would be merely to omit its warning ; and if the hands cannot or will not register pain the arms may be broken. But so it is with society ; each man's experience of life is a test 88 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION by which we can tell whether the social environ- ment is favourable or adverse to human exist- ence. Each man is a nerve which must register its sensations within the central controlling intelligence. For as one nerve or one sense cannot serve to adjust body to environment, neither can one man or set of men legislate for society. We must each study our personal experi- ence in the light of a great ideal, and then demand as our right from society the immediate alleviation of shameful, confining, and despiritual- izing conditions. Another axiom may now be laid down : that every class and group must be fairly represented in legislation to insure the social integrity on which the well-being of all classes and groups depend. For the misrepresentation or uiirepresentation of any social element is merely a drugging of the nerves that register the condition of some vital organ. To inconvenience and oppress labour, accordingly, is equivalent to burdening the social heart ; and likewise to neglect our poets and artists is equivalent to distorting our social vision. Rebellion on the part of any class, accordingly, reveals the presence of an ill by which the whole organism is infected. It is not a desperate and THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 89 dangerous attempt to subvert " law and order," but the holy and invaluable attempt to secure the general health. There are no inherently opposed classes, but only classes unadjusted to the social equilibrium. With these facts in mind, we possess the only fair criterion with which to judge all contemporary social wars, especially the daily contest between capital and labour. Within the traditional State organization for establishing and confirming the rights of men there have arisen a thousand lesser instruments, as we have seen, each smaller yet sharper than the sword of State. We have found that the national organization does very well for vast operations like war, but for minor injuries for child-labour, for sweated women, for the propa- gation of a universal language, for tax reform and scores of revolutionary activities more the private or semi-official association provides a surgeon's knife better adapted to the purpose. All the more severe existing social evils, as we have seen, are inspiring determined propaganda of reform. In other words, the drugged and long stupefied nerves of society have begun finally to register their agony within the central intelligence, and body and mind to co-operate at last for their 90 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION mutual balance and health. The life-blood pour- ing out to every atrophied member is this same passion for rights the intelligence directing the operation of social revitalization is our growing recognition of the fact that immunity can be secured for one man only by securing it for all. What is most needed now, therefore, as we plainly see, is a better co-ordination between the various agencies of reform, and some closer and more active sympathy between politics and social science. A man can be wholeheartedly loyal to only one organization ; he demands, accordingly, that the energy he supplies to this particular movement shall not prove hostile and nugatory to the energy his neighbour is supplying to another movement equally necessary for the common weal. He does not want, by founding or supporting a society for tax revision, for example, to set in motion some devious political reaction which shall affect opposition to women's suffrage. At the present time, unfortunately, he is certain to create some such reaction ; and he finds every public service an alley in a labyrinth of politics and class jealousy, intentionally complex to hold that much-dreaded minotaur, human nature. THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 91 But we know that men have assembled a mass of social information undreamed of a century ago a body of facts and working theories, driven by a great ideal, which transcends the information at the disposal of the authors of the American Constitution as completely as their information transcends the social science of an African village. We know that all the elements needed for a new political synthesis have been assembled and put into solution ; and that, half-felt by the ordinary man, a new public ideal is undergoing the travail of definition and conscious acceptance. It will readily be granted that institutions survive only by continuing to prove advantageous to men. If the American Constitution, for example, should ever become as useless as the feudal system, it will pass into respectable but unlamented oblivion. The only question consists in whether, under any circumstances, a national organization such as England, Germany, or the United States, as we now understand them, could ever lose its utility. When the intra-national societies such as those for tax reform or the prevention of child- labour have accomplished their purpose, they automatically go out of existence, and their 92 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION members are freed for their original allegiance to Church and State. The lesser synthesis merges naturally into the greater, and the driving force impelling the smaller organization is quietly liberated for the service of the greater. Is there any larger synthesis, now nameless and undefined, into which the national States could similarly melt, thus releasing their tremendous forces to the use of a more efficient machine ? Perhaps we are developing the argument too rapidly. To return to the original point of departure, then, let us inquire once more whether a national organization could ever conceivably lose its reason for existence a fair question, surely, to which not even a crown prince could object. A very large part of its reason for existence unquestionably consists in the power to protect its population. Does the modern State really protect? How foolish ! The question, however, is only too well advised. At this very moment the natives of Berlin and the natives of London more than vaguely believe that they may suddenly find them- selves in open and deadly war. Are those people so hostile, those two cities so violently and in- herently opposed, that war is necessary and unavoidable ? Not at all. The danger of war THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 93 does not exist in the individuals of either race (taken separately), nor in the political synthesis we call a city ; it exists only in the larger syn- thesis we call the State. That is, whereas the Germans and the English are sympathetic on the personal basis, and are mutually tolerant when taken city by city, they are prepared, as Germany and England, to shock and injure the whole civilized world. Or, to carry the deduction one step further, some two hundred millions of people are thrust to the utter verge of unnecessary, undesired warfare by that same political organi- zation by which each citizen implicitly believes his life and property are defended. Could England and Germany be dissolved into a synthesis larger than either and including both, this fateful war-cloud would instantly become a very harmless mass of smoke and vapour. Could they be united in some larger political unit, as London and Chester or Massa- chusetts and Virginia are united, they would incur as little risk of war as two cities of one kingdom or two states in one federation. Is such a larger unit impossible ; such a new synthesis incredible ? But sixty years ago Massachusetts and Virginia were at desperate 94 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION war ; and only a few centuries farther back London and Chester were capitals of rival kingdoms ! Prophecy always seems so other- worldly and unpractical until it is recognized to be merely this common old highway of human history laid out a few miles ahead ! On the other hand, the determined patriot (the man who will be loyal and brave, and never give up the ship though he sink the crew) the determined nationalist may argue that international peace may be secured without altering our present political syntheses. For he can truly assert that since in every civilized country there exists a strong peace movement, its effects will be gained for humanity by working separately upon each State ; by merely passing a few new laws through each Senate, Parliament, Reichstag, or whatever the national legislative assembly may be called. But let us extend this apparently innocent pro- cess a little further, and then see what effect it has upon the present political situation. I objected to a government a moment ago because, instead of protecting life and property, it actually threatens both by a terrible international war by a war, moreover, against a people who hate neither its individuals nor have any desire to THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 95 control their property, but who only hate (because they have good reason to fear) that particular political unit in which these lives and their property cohere. Suppose that I object to the present form of representative government on the grounds that it does not represent, that it voluntarily subjects half the population to political serfdom and impotence ? This objec- tion is valid as can be. Civil war has been reaped a thousand times from a far smaller field ! But which half? the patriot stammers, somewhat daunted. The feminine half, the mother half, I answer. And before the unconvinced Adam in him recovers sufficiently to grumble about a paradise the women once lost for us all, I continue with my reasons for desiring women's suffrage. The fact that women hold property and pay taxes, and should therefore have some control over its political status, I pass over as for Anglo- Saxons, at least, too patent for insistence. I omit all discussion, also, of the fact that since women, as workers, have been drawn perilously near the economic buzz saw, they should be given the same power as men to regulate its mutilating activity. I put the question on its 96 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION broadest human basis : that in women society possesses a magnificent creative and conservative force, never so necessary for our common well- being as now, but wantonly wasted for lack of the adequate means for self-expression. More than half the educative, the spiritualizing, even the directive instinct of the human race belongs to the feminine, not the masculine, nature. Being more important than the individual man for the propagation and rearing of the species, the individual woman is by nature endowed with a greater momentum of vitality and energy. In every environment where more work must be done than can be accomplished by the men, women reveal this inherent power. The pioneer's wife labours as hard, and as efficiently, as the pioneer. But modern society, having attempted to relieve the woman's burden of drudgery by invention, has succeeded so well as to deprive a large class of every duty and responsibility save those pertaining to sex. The woman's vast store of initiative and energy has been crowded into that one narrow, confining channel, so that instead of Andromache, mate and begetter of heroes, we are doing our best to evolve a passionate, irresponsible and destructive being, THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 97 dependent, useless, unhappy, hunted, and flattered while despised by men. The woman's movement, then, whatever its immediate goal, for its ultimate purpose has no less an ideal than the re-establishment of a free, noble, constructive womanhood, a state of being, not merely a political and economic condition. But this womanhood can be recovered from the vitiating influence of Paris fashions and the confining influence of household service only by first recovering for the individual woman her social responsibility, then her economic freedom, and last of all her particular public task, whether educative, legislative, judicial, or professional. The modern woman must do a so-called man's work in the world as the only alternative to doing a servant's work or a doll's work. But this is no hardship ; in intelligent activity, in equal responsibility lies the free, glad use of her natural power ; and the professional woman of to-day is restoring not only the old, profound happiness of women, but also their constructive vision of human life, their deliberate, conscious and effective reaction from adverse social condi- tions, and consequently their real fitness for motherhood. Otto Weiniger's cry, hysterical 7 98 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION but intense, insane but sincere, against the destructive influence of women on the in- tellectual and spiritual life, must assume its proper place as a protest against the doll- woman and her eternal mate, the licentious man. For men do not strongly enough appreciate this fact about sex ; that the more it is emphasized in the destiny of women, the more it must be em- phasized in the destiny of men. A distorted sexual self-consciousness in either sex provokes a like self-consciousness in the other. Woman- hood is the only mirror in which manhood can discover its own most heroic stature and divinest features ; a true, entire man, likewise, is the only measure by which a proud and aspiring woman can estimate her own worth. By freeing the woman, therefore, we will free the man ; and it must be understood that in this matter of sex the ideal for which humanity should strive is not that its activity should merely be controllable, as if it were a bad temper or an expensive indul- gence, but that it should be unconscious, like the clean, powerful impulse for food and sleep. As men, our attitude toward the subject is neither unpractically idealistic nor disinterestedly heroic, but both utilitarian and selfish. As THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 99 citizens of a government whose social necessities exceed its political control, we should object to the perpetual irresponsibility of half the popula- tion, especially when we learn from history that this half is essentially helpful and constructive when made responsible, but essentially destruc- tive and dangerous when allowed or compelled to relapse into barbarous individualism. We should demand, for the common good, that women be civilized as rapidly as possible that each one be compelled to stand outside her prehistoric cave of home, and to train herself for public service and public duty. As human beings of the masculine gender, moreover, we should strongly object to being surrounded by women who look to men for a mere living, not for a glorious life; who for board and lodging are willing to accept men as they are, without daring insist upon their transformation into superior, knightly beings ; but, like needy ser- vants, feel themselves very often obliged to endure their position at all costs. Let us demand for our own good as well as the common welfare, that women be compelled to realize how degrad- ing to both members, and to their children, such a marriage must be. The women must learn 100 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION to insist upon some heroic test, to be expressed either in action or in personality, as the one sure proof of love in men, and by exalting and purifying their nature, lead them to require that the women correspondingly exalt and purify their own. A marriage without such mutually- inspiring and mutually-revering influence is, to say the least, a mistake ; but to speak plainly, it is a hideous degradation and sin. When we refer the feminist propaganda to the national form of government, we observe that the modern political unit is far too small to control the movement. It is more important for a rich woman in New York to assist the political agitation of her fellow-women in London than to contribute in any way to a government which, by continuing as long as possible the tradition of war for men and domesticity for woman, con- stitutes a potent hostility to human advance ; it is more important for an intelligent woman in Washington to educate the girls of Persia than to help the poor of her own neighbourhood. Realizing these facts at the same time that she realizes the necessity for a nobler womanhood and manhood, she perceives that her highest social loyalty absolutely transcends the State, and belongs to her sex all over the world. THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 101 But we admit that in time even the blind and obstructive political organization will legalize the new status of women. Does this prove that the national State is a permanent political syn- thesis ? Let us carry the same reasoning through all modern activities for reform. The Socialists of Italy, Germany, France, and Spain, similarly find their interests opposed by the national government, but defended and furthered by an international organization. They know that the national boundary-line does not confine class any more that it confines sex ; but that the ramifica- tions of their economic inequality extend over all Europe. The weight of the Socialistic influence, accordingly, is thrown for the inter- national, not the national organization, and their influence unquestionably constitutes the greatest modern impetus for arbitration and peace. Ad- mitting as before, however, that the better part of Socialism will eventually pass into national legislation, nevertheless, since justice and equality are conditions that cannot be copyrighted nor taxed, the legal status of the working man in Italy will become practically the same as that of an English or German labourer ; and the legal status of the American woman, likewise, will 102 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION become practically the same as that of the women in Europe. But what must be the obvious result upon the different national organizations ? Just this : that each government, in responding to the common internal irresistible popular pressure for reform, will gradually approach every other national government, until, when that pressure has worked itself out in terms of law, the States will have become so nearly identical in spirit and purpose, if not in detail of operation, that all will have been absorbed into a greater State and a more controlling government. That is, a greater political synthesis will have been attained, by natural evolution, not by perilous revolution. Such an international synthesis is hardly a matter for objection or approval, any more than is gravitation or the light of the sun. It repre- sents the logical end of the world's political evolution; and Socialism, Women's Suffrage, Arbitration, exhibit only the more obvious examples of those myriad ties already knitting the broken bones of nationalism into one healthy humanity. Considering the world in its material aspect, we see the supreme futility of individualism as THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 103 an end or even motive of action. It is merely the jungle instinct asserting itself anew in our wrongly-termed civilization. It is only the old brute terror of pain and annihilation, impelling the individual to skulk from tree to tree, fearing every other individual, thus incurring hostility from all. How unsafe that armed peace really was ! But after a little, the savage learns to ally himself with a little group of brothers, sons, and cousins, born in his own particular cave, and thus sharing a bit of that redeeming virtue which makes Ms cave, Ms spear, and Ms woman so much more superior and " distinctive " than those of any other man ; he learns, that is, to create a new political synthesis, in which the original law of self-preservation gives way to the law that the real safety of the individual derives from the safety of the tribe, not because the second law is more idealistic, but plainly because it is more effective. But the new synthesis adopts precisely the same law of self-preservation for the tribe unit, and consequently that particular jungle becomes merely a series of mutually-fearful and destructive tribes instead of a series of mutually- fearful, destructive individuals. In time, how- ever, by a further transfusion of that mystic 104 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION essence of egoism which first made the indi- vidual's own cave superior to his neighbour's, then his own tribe superior to the tribe across the river in time, the tribes in that neighbour- hood dissolve into a greater synthesis, the clan ; and by their mere dissolution render for ever impossible the old interminable tribal feuds. But the tribal feud merely gives way to the clan war, which is an advance in civilization simply because it renders fighting more un- frequent, and removes it farther and farther from the home, where the women are engaged in their constructive occupations, and the clan war, to all intents and purposes, constitutes that particular misinterpretation of the law of self- preservation by which we are all burdened with taxes, armaments, and discouraging rumours to- day. But we are witness to an increasing fellow- ship between the nations, their increasing need for an alliance against the common foe of ignor- ance, sickness, poverty, and crime, and we know that before long this common necessity will overflow the jealous political confines of State and merge all the States into a greater synthesis a social organization more idealistic than the present order only because it is more productive THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 105 and effective. And gazing down at the aimless, hurrying crowds below, we realize that the new synthesis will come as soon as it has been sanctified in the old orthodox manner by a symbol and an immediate personal advantage, sufficiently permeated, that is, by the enduring egoism of men. By the vital necessity inherent in our social development, therefore, we are driven forward to an order in which every present isolated political unit shall be co-ordinated with every other ; an order, moreover, which can and shall take advantage of powerful social principles by securing a closer relationship between economics and law. The individual is now only occasion- ally the unit of social responsibility ; the far greater part of our social existence depends upon the responsibility of larger units, such as parties, corporations, and unions. Our legislative prob- lem, accordingly, consists in developing a legal status for the institution to correspond with the legal status of the individual under a simpler social order. If the results were not so tragic, it would be ridiculous to consider the futility of modern law in the presence of powerful institutions. 106 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION But such a social order would be a political synthesis merely, a synthesis affecting only part of our nature and daily life. There would still remain unprovided for that immense and all- important activity and life we call religion ; and being unprovided for in the political synthesis, it would not be merely neutral to our political existence, but necessarily and continually hostile. Unrelated social elements possess no neutrality, and can never be endowed with the irresponsi- bility which neutrality contains. They are either for us or against us, and as long as they remain unrelated to the general scheme they will prove a terrible foe to our daily welfare. Our religious history is merely the projection of our political growth upon another plane the continual re-interpretation, on terms ever more inclusive and efficient, of the instinct of spiritual self-preservation. The savage, and the uncivilized individual in every environment, guards his soul from the world as zealously as he guards his body, and with as little success. Without pausing to duplicate, with slightly differing phrases, the process from lesser to greater syn- thesis in religion similar to that we have just observed in politics, we must admit that the THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 107 present religious situation is the contemporary stage of a development beginning ages ago, and still far from its termination. Just as we have the mutually opposing and stultifying States, so we have the mutually opposing Churches and religions. Episcopal, Congregational, Nonconformist, are merely cities in the province of Protestantism ; Protestant, Catholic, and Greek Church are only provinces in the Christian state ; Christianity and Moham- medanism are merely Europe and Asia written in terms of religion. But many a person who will admit the possibility of a larger political synthesis, will either deny the possibility of a complete synthesis in religion, or vigorously discount its vital necessity. For why, as the argument runs, why should we bother about a man's inner belief so long as his actions correspond with our ethic and our politic ? In this one sphere, at least, every man has a right to his own opinion ! Moreover, he might insist, we have fought our bloodiest battles to secure this very tolerance. Is it so poor an acquisition that we must despise it as soon as gained ? Though fanaticism is only a more intense expres- sion of that partisan feeling which arms one 108 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION nation against all nations, our present so-called religious tolerance is not the sympathetic recon- ciliation of deep wisdom ; it is rather the laissez- faire of complete indifference. Indifference, however, constitutes the one unforgivable sin in religion as in marriage. What form of toler- ance, then, shares earnestness with wisdom ; what tolerance is both creative and neutral ? By the development of comparative religion into a philosophy, if not a science, we have learned to express every revelation in terms of personal experience. The essence of Chris- tianity, for example, is unselfish love, a doctrine which has absolutely nothing to do with our European ecclesiastical evolution, but derives at first hand from Christ, an Oriental. Applied as a test to our numerous forms of Protestantism, it violently impeaches their long severance, while it demands their immediate union. We have only to stand within our own particular sect and study its points of difference from other sects in the light of pure Christianity. We find that the difference is either historical, theological, or social ; spiritual it certainly is not, and by the same token it is unnecessary. A synthesis of the Protestant sects, then, it THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 109 follows, is not only possible, but inevitable. It may be difficult or even undesirable to merge two social clubs whose membership draws from different classes or interests ; it may be difficult or even undesirable to unite two conflicting philosophies into one reconciling system of thought ; but I hope no one can be found who will assert that Christianity in its enduring, essential aspect as spiritual activity, shares the limitations either of social clubs or intellectual schemes. Without bringing any new or foreign element into the discussion, but applying to each sect the test of its own faith, we can dissolve all Protestantism into a new, glorious synthesis, can unite all these scuffling religious tribes into one potent nation. But Christianity itself would still remain fatally divided. Proceeding by the same method, however, and undeterred either by the glamour of the organization or the apparent authority of the priestly army arrayed before both camps, we can impose the same stern spiritual test, derived from Him whom both alike acknowledge as their Origin and Head, and by the resulting success, or failure, of its operation, can discover how much, or how little real Christianity enters into 110 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION either Church. We perceive, on a larger scale, the same source of discord which has prevented the alliance of Protestant sects, that the essential spiritual activity of men has been perverted, repressed, debased, and obscured by social and intellectual considerations. Those of either camp who refuse to meet upon the common spiritual basis, which is neither Protestantism nor Catholicism, but the ideal of both, those we know and know by the authority of Christ Himself are like unto the rich young man who would not leave his goods to follow the spiritual impulse. They are mere partisans, materialists, and slaves to the dehumanizing, despiritualizing ecclesiastical machine. But having established a firm basis common to all so-called Christians a spiritual and religious synthesis into which all creeds, sects, and schisms can be dissolved, reconciled, and allied we find that we have merely come to the frontier between Christianity, Mohammedanism, Bud- dhism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and other Oriental religions. Is this soul-strewn frontier inevitable and permanent? Let us approach the problem from our own religious point of view, and work forward on lines already familiar THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 111 to our thought. Imagine a sincere, spiritual man who felt an intense desire to bridge this dismal gulf between the races, a man bred in the Christian tradition, but fitted by his own intelli- gence to perceive the difference between the essential and the accidental, between the eternal spirit and the local manifestation. Going to the East, he would find a religious situation strik- ingly like our own, a philosophic system and an ecclesiastical organization grown up about some Prophet Mohammed, Buddha, or another. He would find also that, just as in the West, each religion possessed two kinds of adherents those who merely wore the orthodox badge, so to speak, and those who gained true spiritual activity through a loyal, vital faith. Engaging in conversation with one of the latter (devoutly wishing meanwhile that every race had learned a secondary, universal language in addition to its local mother-tongue), he would quickly make two discoveries: first, that the Oriental and himself had a strong ground for sympathy and union in their mutual love for God and humanity ; second, that they possessed a strong ground for bitterness and contention in their adherence to separate ecclesiastical organizations 112 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION and to unrelated theological traditions. In pro- portion as they spoke of the religious life in terms of personal experience faith, joy, vision, love, prayer they would feel a mutual fellow- ship and respect ; but in proportion as they spoke of the religious life in terms of Churches, priests, and propaganda, they would fall into mutual hatred and contempt. But each would realize that this very hatred and contempt destroyed his own spiritual activity, and under penalty of losing his joy and power, each must emphasize the reasons for mutual sympathy and union, and resolutely thrust away the reasons for discord. In other words, the Occidental and the Oriental must confine their intercourse entirely to man's common love for God and man's common need for a better social order. It would not take long under these circumstances to convince the average man that a union between the racial religions is possible, but only by merging each religion into a new, greater Religion a religion of personal spirituality and social service, a Religion of God and humanity. In his conversa- tions with the Oriental, moreover, the Occidental would incidentally make other discoveries, if indeed he had not already learned the facts by THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 113 his studies in comparative religion. He would discover that the prophet's relation to society is that of teacher that the prophet creates a new synthesis in the spiritual world just as the statesman creates a new synthesis in the world of politics. And just as every nation has its founder, the hero whose vision and power made possible the national existence, so has each religion its founder, the hero whose vision and power united the jealous tribes of superstition and ignorance into racial consciousness. But even when a people receives its political consciousness from one source, and its religious consciousness from another, the two become inextricably fused and involved, so that the political activity gains a kind of sanctity and awe, while the religious activity waxes bold on a hearty fare of racial egotism. Moreover, as in looking back to our Romulus, our King Alfred, our Washington, we feel more intensely the limits of the synthesis they created, and feel more bitterly the opposition of similar syntheses ; so in proportion as we consider it proper and obligatory to look back to Christ, to Buddha, to Mohammed, we feel the terrible grip of our own religious organization and the threatening fanati- 114 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION cism of all others. On the other hand, when we turn our gaze forward when we face the same way they did we feel these limits less and less, this mutually- destructive hostility less and less, and find ourselves in the sweep of a great evolution carrying all nationalities onward into one Confederation, all religious organizations forward to one Religion. The truth even occurs to us that our Christ, our Alfred, or Washington , would advise us to do that very thing. The Western student in the East would learn another fact even less appreciated by society : that each hemisphere, in developing along totally different lines, has acquired the one essential aspect of truth which the other most needs at the present crisis. The East contains a great store of the spiritual wisdom which Europe and America are starving for; while the West possesses a practical knowledge, a social science, without which Oriental civilization is helpless as a child. In other words, Occident and Orient, viewed at large, are the masculine and feminine elements, so to speak, whose union makes human nature harmonious, powerful and productive. The hostility apparently fundamental between them is therefore merely the friction that THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 115 naturally arises when a vigorous young barbarian has stolen a beautiful, sensitive aristocrat for his wife. His strength she admires, but its unre- strained and crude impulsiveness offends her her refined beauty, ever somewhat aloof, charms his imagination, but with it he meets a physical scrupulousness and a moral elasticity which seem artificial and debasing. However, a greater power than cither's personal opinion holds them together. Little by little the man acquires penetration and tact, little by little the woman grows more sympathetic and practical ; and if at their death both still feel a gulf between their natures, they have survived long enough to see the two natures united in their children. The descendants, combining and establishing the superiority of both parents, reveal a human nature more capable that either stock alone. But when the spiritual Occidental and the spiritual Oriental have agreed upon the new religious synthesis in which both can dissolve their separate traditions into a common tradition, looking about to see what obstacle actually prevents such a synthesis becoming an imme- diate fact, they perceive that the organization itself, whether Eastern or Western, tends to 116 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION prevent the operation of the laws that are striving to merge the races. For, strange as it may sound at first, the only purpose of Christianity is to make Christians that is, to bring all men and women into the circle of one Revelation, and by making the whole world (if possible), look backward toward Christ, see the divine love in Him, and consequently feel a unity. But most unfortunately for the purpose, Mohammedanism possesses an organization even more vigorous and effective. And the whole purpose of Mohammedanism is to make Moham- medans to bring all men and women into the circle of another Revelation, and by making the whole world look backward toward Mohammed, see the divine love in him, and consequently come into a different unity. These rival organi- zations constitute a dead centre which no human effort can overcome. One might as reasonably attempt to make all the English Germans, or all the Germans English. It is in the new synthesis, the religion which transcends each by including all it is in the looking and going forward that mankind will unite in one faith and adoration. The prophets are moons that reflect the light of God ; we must use the moon as a guide to THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 117 reveal the sun, not as itself the source of heat and illumination. It is very clear, at this stage of the argument, that a vital relationship exists between spiritual and political truth. It must be more than blind chance which has paralleled the economic with the religious necessity. For the virtue, Unity, most essential to modern government is the virtue most essential to modern religion. We have arrived at a plane upon which social science and Revelation say exactly the same thing ; and we have arrived there by routes traversing both politics and religion, finding the outlook start- lingly similar in both cases. How is this ? The answer lies in the essential unity of personality. In himself, a man combines all the factors of society Church and State merely express different phases of the one integral life of men. But since there exists this eternal personal unity, it is very evident that the separation of Church and State threatens the welfare of every individual ; and indeed this is so. We are all divorced. We carry on daily activity, which our religious advisers criticize or sadly condone. The true religious impulse, which ought to thrust our lives forward easily 118 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION and happily through the day's work, has been trained to resist that work ; and consequently the spiritual necessity is opposed to the material necessity, the moral code to the business code, and we bring a sundered nature both to religion and to our task. But this divorce cannot long endure. The unity that is within us demands a unity without. A political synthesis is very well by itself, and a religious synthesis is very well by itself; but their unco-ordination on such a vast scale would bring about such terrible results that the situation would be unendurable. We need, then, a new social synthesis, in which the world- States and the world-Churches are united and allied ; and happily for the race, the same development working in nations and Churches to secure their respective unity, is also working in both to secure their common unity. The alienation of religion from government, then, is directly responsible for a world which, collectively, is weak, inefficient and cowardly; and, individually, contains men and women absolutely prevented from realizing their best selves joined, as the Creator intended, slowly but surely will arise a civilized, civilizing THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 119 Humanity, and a powerful, serene manhood and womanhood. For we have not yet realized the most vital change that will occur in human life. The union of spiritual activity with practical intelligence involves and renders pos- sible no, renders necessary a social organiza- tion increasingly simple. For the first effect of spiritual activity upon the individual is to make his life simple and sweet. The orgy of organized pleasure-hunting, which wastes more than half our social energy as well as our natural resources, nauseates him from the moment that he discovers a keener, more enduring joy within his own being. All that dehumanizing burden of obligation and expenditure implied in the word " establishment " he throws off with an exhilarating and grateful sense of freedom. His home takes on a new meaning, because it reveals a new use ; and without growing austere and ascetic on the contrary, finding a strange, exciting enjoyment in material things he rear- ranges his social life on an entirely new basis. He does not surrender unnecessary luxury with the desperation of a society woman doing Lenten penance he throws it from him with the un- conscious vigour of a traveller who awakes in a 120 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION wonderfully mild tropical climate, after having lain down shivering under a padded quilt. This necessity for lightness and freedom of personal activity, this new obligation to respond to spiritual pressure, penetrating like a milder climate into every human relationship, will naturally, inevitably render our present economic and political vestment vastly too oppressive. For the ultimate, intoxicating secret of human life will then little by little disclose itself; that the whole purpose of society is to develop and maintain spiritual activity in all its members not to develop institutions and maintain property. This is the ultimatum of our own natures we cannot disobey if we would, nor go on doubting and denying. All that obstructs, sterilizes, and delays our spiritual develop- ment, must gradually disappear from the social structure ; and our children's children will con- sider the nineteenth century as the climax of some dream whose very horror smote the sleeper to consciousness and the dawning day. Our generation, then, stands at the beginning of a supreme expansive social phase. I have employed the term " the new social synthesis " to express that order toward which we move. THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 121 The phrase has been indirectly defined ; I wish to make it as clear as possible, however, and will accordingly summarize its aspect from the point of view of the individual member of society and the individual social institution, whether Church or State. There is in us that series of impulses toward physical, mental, and moral activity which we recognize as the religious life. Their activity is so involved and interdependent that we cannot separate and distinguish out the moral life as being religious, while the physical and the intel- lectual are non-religious. It is rather their complex, as expressed in the various inward necessities of the passing moment, which deserves the name religious. But this series of impulses comes into contact with the outer world at every moment, or is itself affected by the outer world. The individual, accordingly, makes one all- important demand upon society that his own positive, life-driven impulses be given oppor- tunity of expression ; and that society do not so affect him through the activity of others that his impulses are stunted or perverted. The society in which this demand is fulfilled can only be constructed by the co-operation of 122 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION spiritual necessity, as driving and directing force, with social science as agent and tool. In other words, the individual must seize upon every material factor and lever, and employ them for the ultimate benefit of the inward life. Religion must be expressed as efficient, wisely directed service ; and, indeed, the history of every superior man and woman illustrates a hitherto ineffectual but earnest attempt td ameliorate the social condition. Of the separate institutions existing to-day, one necessary virtue must be demanded : that they benefit the inner life, and not destroy it by insistence upon mere material things. The scope of their vision must be extended. The State which attempts to serve its citizens by resisting the needs of other States, really and vitally injures the well-being of its citizens, and does not at all accomplish the purpose of its own existence. Likewise the Church whose code is confined to the salvation of its own members, damns those members to the very negation of spiritual activity. Last of all, institutions must cease splitting up acts into " religious " and " secular," and dividing man's necessity to be from man's necessity to do. In Part VI. this subject will be treated more fully. THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 123 But it is not enough to describe a superior social order ; it is not enough even to point out the elements existing in the present order from which the new order can be constructed. As I have tried to emphasize, all social authority and power derive from individual consciousness ; and hampered as we all are, how can we exert sufficient pressure to mould governments and Churches to a new form ? The individual citizen and the individual Church-member is weak ; it would seem that we should have access to some force as powerful as life itself to make the task possible. If it could be brought about as the harvests come by co-operation with Nature we might dare believe. What seeds have we whose harvest shall be the new social synthesis ? In what field, and by what sun and rain will they grow and be fruitful ? Let us look more closely into the sources of social activity. Not the busy efforts of public men, but evolu- tion itself, throwing all things into a world- wide interminable flux, its momentum derived quite apart from human interference, bears the race for- ward by its universal gravitation. Even when men resist, they and their institutions, ineffectively struggling, are swept along from the lesser to the 124 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION greater synthesis, from wasteful and repressive division to unity increasingly productive and liberating. The force of peoples lies not in their troops and taxes, but in their alignment with evolution. When evolution has passed the point of competing, hostile nations, as it has now passed it, our troops and taxes no longer represent nor produce power, but weakness. We of to-day are no longer defended by our navies ; we are con- stantly threatened by them. All this machinery of Church and State works against social evolu- tion, and therefore expends our time and labour for no return. The ship of State is trying to sail upstream. But whether we know it or not, like it or not, assist it or not, our institutions are slipping with the stream toward a new synthesis. We have only to discover the true direction of social evolution, yield ourselves unreservedly to its power, and we shall find ourselves quietly arrived among better conditions of life. The sublimest social ideal any man is capable of imagining is merely the revelation, for the im- mediate future, of the direction and force of this transcendent power. The greatest man is he who avails himself of its activity, deriving his politics from the needs and conditions of a people, not THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 125 from his own insinuating egotism. And the least of men is he who blindly attempts to resist or pervert evolution, whether he be a private citizen voting for vicious candidates, or an ex- president opposing international arbitration for the sake of an absolutely non-existing chimera called national honour. Both, to the best of their personal ability, are delaying the design of the Creator both will fail, but in their attempt will drag others down. There is no better example of such blindness and consequent failure than Napoleon. In him- self he possessed a mind supremely directive, a will supremely strong, a personality supremely able to gather men to his devoted support. In France he possessed a people whom centuries of accumulating indignation had kindled to the point of social fusion. But he knew not the direction along which evolution was urging the nation ; he threw himself blindly into the uni- versal stream and thought to divert its course so as to further his personal ambition. His great- ness, consequently, dazzles and astounds only when compared with common men. He merely exaggerated our own selfishness to a colossal stature. Compared with the opportunity France 126 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION offered him, he seems a mere puppet, a frantic doll thrust out of the game into a corner, his tin sword broken, and his bright uniform sadly torn. His tragedy is the tragedy inevitable to the per- sonality which uses men for self, not for society. But we are not thereby compelled to accept the traditional " good " man as our ideal. No well- meaning Dr. Primrose, but the far-sighted, constructive Harriman represents the type to which our praise is due ; but the Harriman con- scious of his true relationship to society, and by that consciousness enabled to make his own greatness a social agency beneficial, therefore effectual, beyond the maddest dream of the ambition exiled upon the prison isle of self. Evolutionary also, as we now realize, is that other stream of force which rolls through every individual, bearing the conscious soul to ever broader and deeper states of being. Evolutionary, it is impersonal, transcendent, irresistible. All the ignorance and malice of which a human soul is capable at its worst hour can, by continual exertion, merely hold back the individual from the universal progression to which humanity was dedicated by the fiat of creation. It can merely hold back, as a savage can hold his canoe steadfast THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 127 in a swift river it cannot change the course of the current nor withdraw itself from the river's pressure. All men, at all times, live their lives in the full rush of elemental and eternal powers. All the unhappiness and ruin implied in sin, that word of oldest awe, result from the effort to resist, evade, or divert spiritual evolution ; all happiness, all power, all harmony, all peace, derive automatically from the mere act of yield- ing to the inner stream. In evolution, therefore, we possess the force of nature whose co-operation offers us what harvest we will. Our individual characters and desires are the seed ; and as the seeds fall so the harvest must appear. Undeveloped characters and selfish desires were sown for the social order we now reap ; but character and desire are under- going a tremendous educational process in our generation. The immediate task before all men and women is to understand for themselves, and teach to others, the nature of personal and social evolution, and how they are essentially reciprocal. For co-operation with evolution is brought about by conscious individual adaptation to spiritual and social law. The law operates beneficially only upon conscious minds. Each man and woman 128 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION comes under the control of spirit when he accepts the law ; and society will come under the control of evolution when the law is accepted by all in common. How, then, to propagate the teaching ? The most effective social momentum the supreme thrust by which individuals are flung forward into a superior social order is that derived from the union of statesman and prophet in one man. From no other source can the world acquire the enthusiastic faith out of which unselfish acts are done, and the social vision caught and renewed. For the teaching, in other words, we must have a divine Teacher. PART IV THE DIVINE TEACHER IV A GALILEAN shepherd or fisherman, whom good fortune or the sure intuition of divine curiosity had permitted to hear the Sermon on the Mount, on returning to his neighbours filled with intense joy and conviction, might con- ceivably have told them of this teaching without mentioning the Christ who uttered it ; but how- ever thoroughly he understood the new gospel, however clearly he repeated it in his native village, the completeness and power of his story would have been fatally broken without an expressed personal attitude toward the Prophet, and a lifelong, lifedeep consciousness of the divine- human presence. For the Prophet's relation to his teaching utterly transcends its mere formula- tion into written or spoken words. He is not merely the creator of a new body of spiritual truth, in the manner that a poet creates a new interpretation of life in terms of a dramatic or 131 132 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION epical reaction. Homer attains personality through the Iliad ; Shakespeare's presence de- fines itself in the presence of his characters ; but a revelation exists only to the extent that its Prophet continues to exist in the consciousness of men, and apart from his existence in human consciousness it has no being. For a revelation is essentially personality, human life, character, destiny. Printed, it remains only a philosophy or dream until, somehow, by an overwhelming, passionate desire for spiritual excellence, the Prophet Himself is felt as a living, immediate presence and being, when the words leap out as from moving lips, and become ever afterward his words, wherever, however met. No man, it can be stated, ever actually found Christ in his message, but always his message in the Christ. The secret of this lies in the fact that the spiritual life, as we understand and desire it, is Christ. The two have become identified, and in the person of the man Jesus the spiritual life has its eternal type and reality. The spiritual life, we must realize, is the expression of an inner activity which renders the individual a perfect harmony. All morality, all virtue, all spiritual THE DIVINE TEACHER 133 conduct derive from the individual, as leaves derive from the activity of a tree. Without the inner balance and unity, there can be no morality, virtue, nor spiritual conduct, or, as the personality is partly and incompletely spiritual, life expresses itself in spasmodic and fragmentary morality and action. Christ the Prophet, and Christ the inner balance, are a perfect whole a man. The rest of the world are only parts of a perfect whole and fractions of men. But this perfection of manhood, the conscious or unconscious passion of every life, can never be realized apart from its perfect type. Thus, in proportion as men have from time to time recovered his presence as an actual, palpable existence in their conscious souls, they have recovered for themselves the manhood he expressed to the world. At other times, when the presence is lost, the type of perfect man- hood disappears, and men become unable to rise above their weak and sundered natures. They become desperately virtuous without sympathy, moral without joy, or theological without vision subject always to disastrous readjustments, plunging them into frank bestiality or critical atheism. The Prophet, then, has this supremely important relationship to the world : he is the 134 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION eternal point of recovery for the vision of self, and in the Prophet's station all men exist potentially perfect. No other man can effect this recovery perfection is unique for the civilization it represents and for us, accordingly, the ideal of human nature has been for ever set apart and sanctified in the person of the Jew, Jesus Christ. For all that the Prophet was human nature made perfect, and for all that men in every age, of all classes and kinds, have recovered their own innate perfection in him, yet Christianity, as a civilization, is completely, conspicuously a failure. It has worked out for individuals, but not for society. Why should that be ? Why should it be that the Church, in the vigour of its youth, could not retain its unity, but split into Roman and Greek ? Why is it that this Holy Catholic Church is neither holy nor catholic ? Why is it that under the very shadow of the Cross, the national instinct of Europe developed into an overwhelming racial egotism and State selfish- ness ? While Europeans all professed themselves Christians, why did they divide themselves into Germans, Italians, French ? Why is the national government to-day, even in Catholic countries, THE DIVINE TEACHER 135 far stronger and more popular than the ecclesias- tical organization? The facile reply to this indictment, throwing the fault upon human nature itself, or even upon " external irresistible forces," involves the deduction that either the Christian ideal is essentially impracticable and obsolete, or that religion itself really has no con- cern with daily life. But Christianity has always worked out for individuals, and is still working out for individuals with undiminished success. It* failure evidently consists in its lack of a social control. Christianity, indeed, as all men dimly recog- nize, is religion in terms of the individual, not in terms of society. To understand the distinction fully, we must go back to Christ's ministry and study its method. He met people singly, in groups, or in assembled multitudes. But the groups and the multitudes were only the in- dividual man and woman multiplied. That is, the multitude who heard the Sermon on the Mount came and heard it in their simple capacity of human beings. Like any casual multitude which our civilization contributes to a public speech or exhibition, they threw aside for the time their accidental class distinctions, their 136 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION political opinions and connections, their trades and professions, and entered heartily into the spirit of the occasion. The same man-to-man unity and simplicity takes place to-day, under one condition, at every public meeting, whether it be the church, the theatre, or the athletic field, and that condition is that the occasion offer interest enough to divest the individual of his accidental social attributes. Christ's conversa- tions and addresses offered this interest in the most abundant measure. His personality pos- sessed, and still possesses, the unique property of desocializing the individual and making him, for the time being, an elemental and eternal soul. He addressed himself to that elemental and eternal soul-thing inherent in every man and woman, summoning it from its inactive im- maturity or controlling it in its often violent and misdirected maturity always and for ever devot- ing himself to the task of intensifying the spiritual activity of men. He found human nature a misunderstood, uncorrelated form of existence, and he gave our civilization the type of personality at its best. But it is only for the time that the individual man and woman can be desocialized. \Yhen the sermon is spoken, the THE DIVINE TEACHER 137 drama played, the multitude separates, each man his own way to his own duty. Little by little the charm is broken ; slowly but surely the fisherman find himself a fisherman once more, the banker becomes the banker, the democrat the democrat, the philosopher the philosopher, and the fool the fool. Within less than a day the common social necessity has seized inexorably upon each man and woman, and all fall back into their former races, classes, occupations, and temperaments. Yet all alike may carry away the Christ-given vision of his own perfection with the desire to attain that perfection in terms of daily life. But what happens ? What did happen, historically ? The individual found that the new gospel taught him precisely his proper attitude toward every other individual, but it said absolutely nothing as to his proper attitude toward other men and women as society. The Christian thus found, and finds to-day, that his religion succeeds wherever he deals with individuals, but fails wherever he deals with numbers. He is equipped to treat properly his father, his mother, his brother and sister, his wife, his children, his servants, and his neighbours in other words, he 138 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION is equipped for life in the simplest of all societies; but in any society even by a little more extended and complex, he must depend upon the ex- perience of men. That is, he goes to religion to solve his personal relations, but he goes to science to solve his social relations. When it comes to a matter of law-making, the beatitudes are less useful than a child's primer of economics ; and the Golden Rule is mute in the presence of the vote. We have in Christianity, then, a man-to- God and a man-to-man revelation, but not a man-to-men revelation, by reason of Christ's method of ministry. For our modern life, there- fore, Christianity is not only incidentally or accidentally a failure ; it is inherently, absolutely, and permanently a failure. It does not fail to work in the same way that a child's tin sword would fail to work in a desperate battle it fails to work as the microscope fails to work when directed against the stars. The focus lies in the individual consciousness, while the whole world travaileth for a religion whose focus is projected into the consciousness of society. If any doubt of these conclusions exists, we have only to consider the case of Tolstoy. Tolstoy was so great a man that by his individual spiritual THE DIVINE TEACHER 139 efforts he recovered the soul of a departed age. The " Bible times," with their tremendous back- ground and atmosphere palpitant with divine things, seemed to return as the environment of his life, and through one personality to be imposed upon our modern civilization. The Hebrew tradition, created in the Eden of some ancient popular joy, thrust into unhappiness for disobedience to the spiritual impulse ; populating the earth ; accumulating the dynamic experience of Cain, Noah, Abraham, Job ; enriched by the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah ; socialized and civilized by the Mosaic law ; consummated in the revelations of Christ and Mohammed ; vitalized thereby with eternal authority and power, but diverted into the consciousness of two hostile races ; for us continuing through the Apostles, the evangelists, and martyrs, to the doctors and mystics of the Roman Church ; broken again into two hostile currents by the Reformation ; now feebly and ineffectually diffused through our social consciousness by the rills of a thousand sects that tradition, the world's most imposing synthesis of socialized spiritual experience, flashed like an archangel's sword in this man's hand, and clave in two the rotten shield of civilization. 140 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION He tried the world by the eternal test of personal experience, and found beneath its heavy vestments a heart dried by grief or fouled by joyless passion. He held Europe before the divine, searching mirror of the soul, and Europe leered back a harlot and a knave. Tolstoy is apostolic. Our dialects have no word for him we must make use of the speech of peoples who walked with God. King David, who was also Warrior-David and Poet-David, could understand this Russian better than the Russians ; Job and St. Peter are nearer akin to his nature than his own children. But what was the effect upon society of this greatest of Christians ? What did the Christian ideal accomplish through this best of modern believers ? Tolstoy's influence is a ferment whose activity has only just begun. Nevertheless, judging his life by its results upon social abuse upon the really fundamental, inherent injustice of society it is fair to say that the governor of Tolstoy's province, or the mayor of any western city, could accomplish more public benefit in six months than Tolstoy brought about in a lifetime. Moreover, the governor or mayor could do so without possess- ing more than a fraction of Tolstoy's personal THE DIVINE TEACHER 141 spirituality, and without paying the penalty of his mental pain. Why ? Because the public official has under his hands a few levers which control the operation of the social machine because he can affect a multitude of people of both sexes, all ages, classes, religions, intellects, and temperaments, without coming into direct contact with a single one, or being diverted from his purposes by maddening personal questions ; while Tolstoy, working apart from the social organization, had to influence people one by one, through his example, his conversa- tion, his literature, and his daily acts. That is, he dealt with the world as if it were merely an extensive but homogeneous group, like a High- land clan or an African village. He used the microscope of personal salvation instead of the telescope of social salvation. His life, therefore, was shut off from all other lives by an invisible but impassable line ; he was a lone patriarch, an austere apostle moving among his fellow men, loving all, consecrated to the service of all, yet unable to do more than clothe a few naked, visit a few sick, and comfort a few broken-hearted. Yet this merely implies inadaptability of the Christian revelation to modern conditions ; it 142 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION does not expose any weakness in Christianity when working in its own sphere. The micro- scope is not to be broken because it will not reveal the stars. No. Christianity remains a perfect revelation for the personal life. It is not an old, romantic dream, a hopeless effort to spiritualize men, an almost abandoned faith in God and heaven. Nor is religion merely a function of primitive races and homogeneous peoples, a refuge from the world and a cloistered immunity from war, taxes, and children ; but if really divine, it is evolutional, and will show itself more administrative than government, more authoritative than economics. Can it be so ? It is very evident that we need a religion in terms of society a revelation, that is, which will not attempt to displace and deny the essential truth of Christianity, but fulfil it for the modern world. We need, in other words, the additional lens which transforms the microscope into an instrument for long distances. This religion must not be a new religion, in the sense of being an exotic, but a renewal of the existing religions and their translation into a modern code and gospel. Broadly speaking, it must be an identifi- cation of social science with individual initiative THE DIVINE TEACHER 143 and spiritual passion. The religious personality must express itself socially, in public service, allying itself with every available instrument for reform. The old passion for self-salvation must be recovered, invigorated, and intensified by every possible means, but diverted, once for all, into the channel of human service. Self-salvation as a traditional psychology must be absolutely stamped from the human consciousness ; as an end for religious organizations it must be fought as the true enemy of welfare, the only successful opponent of the very self-spiritualization it is supposed to bring about. The whole wretched tradition of " self " and " heaven " must be re- interpreted and re-expressed. From the servant- maid who betrays her instincts to a priest lurking in his dark confessional, to the Hamlet who laments his weakness to the stars, the modern world is infected by a diabolical perversion of Christ's teaching. Instead of turning inward to that fatal misadjustment by which most men and women at some period of their lives are rendered miserable and erring, instead of magnifying our evil by concentrating upon its power to affect our lives, we must resolutely turn all hope and interest outward, fixing our thoughts on any 144 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION external a friend, a great social movement, or God endeavouring by prayer and activity to put ourselves into the stream of faith and en- thusiasm constantly flowing across the world. For the joyous and "free" man that is, the man who has found salvation is he whose con- sciousness has burst the bonds of self and become identified with an outside thing. For him "self" no longer exists ; and by entering his new state of self-forgetfulness he transfers his spiritual habitation, as it were, from a low, mean, smoke - oppressed city to the vision-lapped mountain of God. But I need no more than suggest the new theology, which has already received the attention of modern minds. We are concerned here rather with the origins of the religious movement which alone can bring about the consummation we have learned so devoutly to desire. It exists as the best aspiration of earnest men, and as an aspira- tion it has long existed. So also the aspiration for a divine manhood and womanhood existed in the racial consciousness long before the birth of Christ. We yearn for a divine social order as the Hebrews yearned for a divine personality; but our passion is not at all a sign that we have THE DIVINE TEACHER 145 transferred our faith from the soul to the machine. It indicates, rather, as every man's experience too clearly shows, that personality depends vitally upon the social environment, and therefore that in order to obtain men we must first obtain means. An English clergyman voiced the com- mon opinion when he said that it is unfair to expect a man to meditate on heaven while he owes the butcher ; but we must not overlook the fact that our civilization renders it equally unfair to the butcher. All the prophets since Christ and there have been many have pointed the popular consciousness toward social salvation ; and the popular instinct, sometimes daring to believe in the second coming of Christ, believes that His modern message will contain hope for this world as well as the next. At all events, we are certain that religion can- not be re-established except through the medium of a Prophet, a " Messiah." As all the elements that enter into a perfect personality had to be united in one being and expressed in one life in order to set before every man and woman the type of his or her perfection, so must the elements of the perfect social order be gathered and synthesized in one mind in order to set before 10 146 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION each social concomitant the type of its own per- fection. Before we can accomplish anything with village, city, province, and nation, we must know what the ideal village, city, province, and nation are which in each case involves a knowledge of what a perfect humanity would be or, better still (since every social organization is in a con- tinual state of flux, and perfection in each must consist of a sliding scale of efficiency, a balance undisturbed by mere change in number of population or size of community) better still, we must know what each person's attitude and course of action must be in order to release the evolutional tendencies toward efficiency in the social order. For since society is an increasingly complex system of men, women, and children, its structure automatically undergoes constant readjustment to the changing attitude and activ- ity of its members. The Prophet of society, accordingly, must first possess the divine person- ality of the Christ, and then express this personality in terms of social unity. That is, he must take to himself the relation of all men and women to their environments, throughout the whole extent of that relation, from its immediate contact with the town organization to its remote, THE DIVINE TEACHER 147 yet equally important contact with State, with other States, and with other races ; and uniting all these complex, mutually opposing, and stultifying relations into one harmonious syn- thesis by the creative vision of his own soul, give them all out again to the world as an ideal social relationship in which every man, woman, and child can find his own proper attitude and activity clearly, eternally expressed. And this ideal type must be able to serve for every nation alike, every race alike, and every religion alike. It must be more English than Magna Charta, more Ameri- can than the Constitution, more Catholic than Catholicism. It must be a universal synthesis, that is, to insure the right evolutional adjustment in the individual relationship derived therefrom. By universal is not meant uniform, but that syn- thetic comprehensiveness which permits to every personality the sanctity of its differentiation, and to every race the sanctity of its peculiar temper- ament. The Prophet, then, must be the world's saviour ; not the representative of any nation, race, or class. He must possess the unimpeach- able authority of the divine personality and the universal soul. He must actually be that human 148 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION unity of which all other men and women are the essential parts. By that power of absolute self- effacement which only the Divine Personality acquires, he must send out his soul to all places and peoples, infusing his divinity like an essence throughout the world, gathering as upon one sensitive plate the experience of every man and woman ; then within his intelligence refin- ing from all the ideal, typical experience in which we may discover our own lives poten- tially perfect. No less a result will serve ; for we have already seen how national, racial, and ecclesiastical egotism, far from insuring superiority or even safety to the nation, the race or the religion, necessarily surrounds it with implacable foes and an inevitable fate. The existence of any social fragment, in other words, depends upon the unity and co-operation of the whole society. The method by which this Prophet would express his message, accord- ingly, would differ from the method of Christ. Reacting from society as a perfect organization instead of from the individual man or woman as a perfect personality, he would direct his teaching so as to concern our social rather than our personal relations. Re-establishing THE DIVINE TEACHER 149 the authority of all existing authentic revela- tions, he would not be confined to their mere repetition nor even to their comparison and reconciliation. The modern prophet, therefore, i on taking up the task differentiating him from all previous prophets the task of extend- ing Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, to their evolutionally logical consum- mation could not secure his purpose by the spoken word and the sermon alone. The spoken word is limited by the capacity of the hearers and the opportunity of the occasion; but the written word suffers no limitation, since it is available to all men at all times. The Newest Testament, that is, would be written by the Prophet Himself. Without such a Prophet, we know only too thoroughly the helplessness of the world. Liberalizing influences are everywhere at work, but at most these can only raise existing institu- tions to a higher efficiency, each within its own compass ; they cannot transform the purpose for which each institution was originally founded, aligning it with the modern vision, nor can they co-ordinate them. Only the synthesis of all influences into one definite movement can free 150 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION men and women from this tangle of things. Yet, as we have seen, the Prophet would bring no message essentially new, in the sense that it was unheard of. His message would consist of all the aspirations of East as well as West, of women as well as men. Its newness, therefore, would appear in its supreme capacity to assimu- late spiritual passion and social science into one human synthesis. No man could receive such a message and say that he himself had already thought and desired its whole content ; yet all men could hear it and say that it realized their highest personal and social ideal. In him the true Christian would be compelled to recognize the Christ personality, and in him the atheistic humanitarian must acknowledge a social zeal and wisdom deeper than his own. Resistance to him, and hatred of his followers, could derive only from obvious and despicable motives ; pre- judice, ignorance, selfishness, snobbery, bigotry. Discounting the temporary opposition of privi- leged or official cjasses who feared for their own private prosperity, we can admit one fertile course of obstruction in the very general characteristic of men, which after centuries of social de- velopment, after we have all learned not too THE DIVINE TEACHER 151 grudgingly to share our food, our education, and our vote, still makes us painfully loath to share our God. But this raises the question of the relationship between such a prophet and Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, and Zoroaster. The orthodox of all races believe that God and his Prophet are a natural and inalterable duality ; and that the existence of any other prophet is a challenge to the constancy of the Creator. Very happily, it does challenge our conception of His constancy as especial consideration for any particular race. Each people has had its prophet ; but the message of all has been essentially the same the possibility of a perfect personality for every man and woman. The new prophet would fulfil all the prophets accordingly, by his interpretation of per- sonality in terms of social service. Once admit- ting the existence of an authentic revelation to every race, we realize that each people has pro- duced not one prophet only, but a succession of prophets, the later revealing ever more and loftier truth ; and that this fact depends upon a race's increasing capacity to absorb teaching. The re- lationship of a modern prophet, such as we have imagined, to Christ or to Mohammed, may well 152 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION be expressed in the poetic figure of the East, as the full moon rising on the fourteenth night, which, while the same planet as the new moon, can reflect more light than the new moon by virtue of its more advantageous position. If such a prophet should appear, his effect upon the ordinary man and woman would be immediate and immense. As religious natures who felt sorrow at their inability to become more than amateur, occasional, self-conscious, and inefficient social workers, he would give them an activity which increased their spirituality at the same time that it accomplished results in human lives ; as practical natures devoted to some social or political reform without benefiting by spiritual powers in themselves or in others, he would set them an ideal which increased their public efficiency at the same time that it initiated their spiritual evolution ; and as for the majority, who are neither very spiritual nor very public-minded, he would rouse their lives from negative adjustment to environmental pressure as by the bugle of defensive war. For his supreme influence would consist in restoring the individual conscience to its proper relationship toward self and others. To those confined in THE DIVINE TEACHER 153 the dark prison of sickness or indifference, he would fling the keys of joyful, invigorating freedom ; and the over- conscientious he would release from their atlas-burden of the world's wrong. For, after all, the individual is limited as to his social usefulness, and consequently as to his responsibility. Whatever he can accom- plish must be done outside the regular course of business, yet inside the compass of the twenty- four hours. Yet the new revelation would provide him with an attitude which auto- matically, by the momentum of social evolution, must turn all his activity into public service, thus preserving his self-respect without hardening his sensibility, and releasing his natural impulses toward joy without insulting the unfortunate and weak. The ordinary person is not only a temperament, which is a limitation in itself, but also a member of one class, one nation, one religion, and one race. These limitations are inherent and eternal, but the new teaching would turn the limitation of temperament into the opportunity of personality, and would provide every social position with a straight path toward human unity and co-operation. As every being can learn his own perfection in the station of 154 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION Christ, so could the world learn its unity in the station of the new prophet ; which once given mankind could never be lost, but would serve every environment and every age as the point of recovery for its perfect relationship to the whole human society. But now, after dealing with truth in the ideal or spiritual world, I shall deal with truth in the material or historical world. There are these two orders of truth, both eternal and both incontrovertible ; as when we say that the pure in heart shall see God, arid that Columbus discovered America. United, these two orders of truth are not only incontrovertible, but irresistible ; and it is in the deepest consciousness of the import of both words that I tell the life and teaching of him whose presence has realized for men this new Prophet Baha'o'llah. PART V HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT ON beginning a brief history of Baha'o'llah, 1 suggest that those startling parallels be noted which exist between this prophetic manifestation and the manifestation of Christ, to secure that reverence without which places, people, and even events, possess little of their true human value. The differences, also, should be remarked no less thoughtfully, for there are none without vital and logical significance. It requires all our power of concentration, comparison, and interpretation to enter even partially into this divine life and works. As one reads, moreover, passing from one city to another, from one date to another, one should raise a clear background of daily life and common things, to throw into proper relief the Prophet's tremendous figure. In the year 1819, at Shiraz, Persia, was born Mirza Ali Mohammed, the son of a prosperous wool merchant. Upon his father's death, the 157 158 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION child was reared by an uncle, and given the education of all Persian boys of his class. At the age of twenty-four years, after a youth con- spicuous for its reverence and beautiful character, he announced to the principal scholars and holy men of Persia that he bore a message from God, which it was his destiny to give his country. The Persia of that time was an autocratic govern- ment, from which a great class of public officials derived social position and wealth, while inex- tricably involved in this political labyrinth ran the orthodox Mohammedan faith. The priests, or " mullahs," constituted a class as powerful and severe as the aristocracy, and the interests of both united in supporting religious orthodoxy and political inflexibility. At the occasion of his public announcement, Mirza Ali Mohammed adopted the name of " Bab," which signifies door or gate, and by this title has been called ever since. His message, which he began to propagate immediately, was clear and simple : that the Mohammedan religion had been corrupted and abused by ignorant, often vicious clergy, and must be restored to its original purity ; that the Koran was not the final revelation to Moham- medans, but preparatory to another and greater HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 159 revelation ; and that after nineteen years would appear the Great One, u He whom God would make manifest." The Bab taught also the spiritual equality of women with men. His influence was powerful and immediate, creating among the people a spirit of dissatis- faction with existing conditions, fomented by a new and passionate hope for better. The mullahs, alarmed at a movement which impeached their infallibility and threatened their supremacy and emoluments, intrigued with the official class to secure the Bab's imprisonment on the charge of hostility to the State religion. After a mock trial, this modern John the Baptist was shot in a public square at Tabriz, in July, 1850. He left eighteen disciples, one of whom, a woman called Kurru-t'ul'Ayn (" Consolation of the Eyes "), a poet, leader, and teacher, ranks among the most powerful personalities of our time. She also was executed for the faith two years later. In 1852, a young Babi, his mind affected by the execution of his master, made an unsupported and unauthorized attempt upon the Shah's life. The mullahs, who hitherto had been able to prove no political connection in the Babi movement, now gave it an indelible political complexion, and the 160 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION government transferred to its legal machinery the trouble of exterminating the new sect. Leading Babis were imprisoned and many prominent men executed. Amid the frenzied persecution now following, more than 30,000 men, women, and children suffered martyrdom. In the worst persecutions inflicted upon the early Christians we find a parallel, but not a more terrible situation. The suddenly awakened inhumanity of the orthodox clergy and the official aristocracy, how- ever, only emphasizes the stern joy with which the Babis met doom. Execution was inflicted in the most barbarous manner, and under the most heartrending circumstances. It is unnecessary to give details here the important fact for us is that religious faith, in our own times, once more revealed its secret power to triumph over the agony of fire and steel, and so to elevate the soul that parents could find joy in seeing their children slain for the truth of God. Among the most influential Babis was Mirza Husain Ali Nuri, born at Nur, in Mazandaran, on November 12, 1817. His family was eminently noble, and had contributed viziers and councillors to the royal court. In the natural course of events, therefore, this child would have HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 161 become a courtier and official, but from his early youth he turned toward his own spiritual de- velopment, and refused to enter upon a public career. He was imprisoned for four months during these persecutions, confined in a dungeon, heavily chained to five other Babis. When no political conspiracy could be proved in his con- duct or implied in his religious convictions, his property was confiscated and he himself, with his family, banished to Baghdad, beyond the Persian border and under the jurisdiction of the Sultan of Turkey. A great number of Babis, feeling in him the intelligence, sympathy, and courage necessary to guide them through such trying times, followed with their families in voluntary banishment. This took place in 1852. The condition of the Babi community on its arrival at Baghdad represented economic chaos, complicated by the various opinions, social positions, and temperaments of the individual members. Mirza Ali, however, arranged their lives and activities, constructing from these help- less but willing emigrants an efficient, happy settlement. As soon as the foundations had been laid for their order and prosperity, he withdrew to the mountains north of Sulaimanziah, where n 162 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION for two years he lived in solitude, continually meditating and drawing freely from the source of all human inspiration and power. His presence even there became known, and holy men from near and far visited the hermit to discuss spiritual problems and experience. After two years, the Babi community at Baghdad urgently begged his return, as their circumstances had become difficult during his absence. Returning to Baghdad, Mirza Ali gradually created so prosperous a settlement that Babis and others from all parts of Asia began to join themselves to the community. Their increasing numbers and influence frightened the clergy, and the Persian Government treated with the Sultan for the surrender of the religious leader. Preferring to retain him on Turkish territory, the Sultan summoned Mirza Ali to Constantinople. Outside Baghdad, on his way to Constantinople, he stopped his first day's journey at an estate called the " Garden of Riz- wan," where he was joined by his followers, nearly all having preferred to attend him in his new exile. Twelve days were spent in the Garden of Rizwan, during which time Mirza Ali Nuri, by the authority of his own personality, gave an eternal, world-wide significance to this HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 163 religious movement, and transferred its scope from Persia and Mohammedanism to humanity and religion. In this garden he announced to his followers that he was the supreme manifestation of God foretold by the Bab, and publicly assumed the name of " Baha'o'llah," the Glory of God. He commanded the Babis to look no more to the Bab for their prophet, but to himself, whose revelation would fulfil the Bab's prophecy and dissolve their Mohammedan sect in the larger synthesis of Bahaism. His announcement in- cluded the declaration of the essential unity of men, the common bond between the religions, and the final reconcilement of Churches and States in him. With the consciousness of their new human significance, the Bahai exiles pro- ceeded on their journey, and arrived at Constan- tinople in 1864. Their reception by the population was un- expectedly friendly. The government placed houses at the disposal of Baha'o'llah and his family, while the followers found occupations in the various bazaars. Converts to the cause were made so rapidly that once more the orthodox ecclesiastical organization set itself in motion against Baha'o'llah, with the result that after 164 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION only four months in the capital, he was trans- ferred to Adrianople, on the northern frontiers of the Empire. Constantinople, we remember, most conspicuously emphasizes the failure of Christianity to control the political necessity of men. The effect of residence at Adrianople was to bring BahaVllah into relationship with European civilization, thus uniting his intuitive wisdom with that stock of scientific and socio- logical experience which so completely differ- entiates the personal problem of life in West and East. Without this contact and assimila- tion, Baha'o'llah's revelation might have re- mained Oriental in its statement and expression, and, conditioned by the incomplete social ex- perience which that implies, might have reached our Western consciousness only through the medium of an intervening personality a St. Paul, that is, whose interpretation would have lessened fatally the prophet's power to unite. Happily for both hemispheres alike, this contact of intuition and social experience did take place, and, as a result, Europe and America enter equally with the Orient into this prophetic station. The most conspicuous public action of Baha'o'llah at Adrianople was to send letters HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 165 to the authorities of every Western nation, calling for their co-operation in his purpose to unite mankind. No one requires to be told how negative an effect these letters apparently had upon our history. In such a case, however, we are not to judge the prophet's seeming impotence from the official silence his letters received ; we are to judge his authority and irresistible power by the increasing development, among the people themselves, of the same passion for unity and reform. For a prophet is not a commander, having armies and treasuries to carry out his orders ; he is the expression of those very inward impulses which all men will learn in themselves to reverence and obey. In these letters, moreover, Baha'o'llah uttered pre- dictions which make them notable even on the material plane. In 1868, for example, he fore- told to Napoleon III. the fall of his empire, and to the Pope the loss of his temporal power.* A cross section of European and American history in that year would render the letters their true and awful significance as the utterance of the world's own conscience, awakening to its de- * BahaVllah also foretold the loss of Adrianople to the Turks. His imprisonment in that city is most interesting to recall at the present time. 166 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION humanizing social conditions. A petty sectarian agitation, semi - religious and semi - political, aroused by a rival among the Babis, again brought the Bahai movement before the political authorities, and in 1868 Baha'o'llah's enforced pilgrimage began once more, taking him this time, with about seventy followers, to the lowest and meanest of Turkish penal settlements, the prison of Akka in Palestine. The instructions concerning their treatment sent to the prison officials were most severe. For two years these seventy people were con- fined in two rooms and allotted an unspeakably miserable fare. Severe epidemics broke out among them, yet thanks to the common faith, the common joy in the midst of desolation, and to the devoted nursing given the sick by their unstricken fellows, the ill-treatment carried off only six members. The ecclesiastical and political hatred aroused by the Bahai teaching penetrated to the prophet's little company in many forms. Their dead were left uncared for among them until the burial expenses were paid and repaid time and again, and communications made by Baha'o'llah to the Sultan, protesting against the despicable treatment inflicted upon women and HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 167 children remained undelivered. Yet by the uniform kindness and fairness the Bahais dis- played toward each other and toward their keepers, the military discipline little by little was relaxed, and Baha'o'llah was finally permitted to take a house in town, though still within the fortifications. Even there, however, he was confined in one room for seven years. Gradually the Bahais were released on parole, and permitted to form a settlement of their own in the town. The world has no community like the Bahai community at Akka. The colony was con- tinually recruited from the East, by men whose spiritual sympathy drew them to this point and centre of religious life. The community, accord- ingly, has been composed of individuals belong- ing to religions inherently opposed and fanatic, to nations and castes historically hostile, to environments which had necessitated totally different ideas and customs ; but within the new spiritual and social synthesis of Bahaism they found their interests mutual and interdependent. For forty years no judge has had to settle dis- putes between them. The American and Euro- pean visitors there have found themselves surrounded by a truer fraternity, a deeper sym- 168 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION pathy, a more vigorous religious spirit than they can experience in their own towns. It is a projection of Baha'o'llah's revelation upon the actual world. From 1869 to 1892, the prophet was chiefly concerned with writing his doctrinal works. Hitherto, his teaching had spread by means of letters written to his distant disciples and to those who applied for the resolution of meta- physical and ethical problems. From 1869 until his death, Baha'o'llah revealed the moral and sociological principles which control the world's development. Sometimes in the language and symbolism of orthodox Christianity or Moham- medanism, sometimes in the style of Sufi, or free thinker, he brought to light those mysterious laws which, hidden from the ordinary being in the vast operation of social evolution, contain the true and creative relationship of individual and society. On May 28, 1892, at the age of seventy-five, his work entirely done, Baha'o'llah died, in full enjoyment of his powers and faculties to the end. It was our own conscience, our own aspiration and pure passion for human betterment, which those prison walls confined and insulted, but could not destroy. HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 169 The confusion, the reaction, and spiritual division usually attendant upon a prophet's death were in this case happily prevented. Baha'o'llah's revelation was literary, not word of mouth ; and not only does the written word endure, but it remains free from those variations of interpretation which memory and changes of personal mood inevitably throw upon human speech. Moreover, Baha'o'llah possessed a spirit- ual as well as natural heir in the person of his eldest son Abdul Baha, whom shortly before death he had designated the leader of the Bahai movement, the " Greatest Branch," who was one with himself. This succession was entirely spiritual, since not only does the Bahai teaching permit no ecclesiastical organization, but Abdul Baha was so designated for his power and merit, not his relationship. Our historical outline, accordingly, continues without interruption down the life and activity of Baha'o'llah's son. Abdul Baha (" Servant of Baha ") was bom at Teheran on May 23, 1844, the day that the Bab declared his mission. His personality I can best describe by quoting from the work* of a French * " The Universal Religion : Bahaism/' by Hippolyte Dreyfus. London, 1909. Cope and Fenwick. 170 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION author among the Europeans best informed on the whole subject of Bahaism. " He had con- stantly been with his father, sharing his suffering since earliest childhood, also profiting more than all the others by the marvellous power which emanated from Baha'o'llah's person. Endowed with a captivating charm, with an eloquence which made his conversation sought after by his most irreducible adversaries, he joined to the in- domitable energy inherited from his father quite a personal gentleness, combined with that par- ticular tact sometimes possessed by Orientals, which straightway makes them equal to any situation. With the son of Baha'o'llah, these qualities, united to the power of self-mastery which . . . can alone render us master of others, have made of him one of the strongest and at the same time most seductive mentalities which can be imagined. His unique intelligence is capable of seizing at the first glance all the aspects of a question, and without hesitation seeing its solution ; his heart attracts all the disinterested of life, who feel themselves in- stinctively drawn towards him." After forty years of imprisonment, Abdul Baha was released by the action of the Sultan, HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 171 Abdul Hamid, who re-established the Constitu- tion of 1876 and freed all the political prisoners of the empire. Since Baha'o'llah's death in 1892, Abdul Baha, the perfect Bahai, has not only personified Bahaism as the new relationship of man to society, as well as its emphasis of the Christian relationship of man to God, but he has effectively spread the Bahai message through Asia, Europe, and America. It is difficult to realize at first how this could be done by a prisoner without money, political influence, or an ecclesiastical organization. Abdul Baha's imprisonment was not like that of the "prisoner of the Vatican," it was like the apostle's incarceration, whom Heaven itself un- chained to promote the divine purpose. Slowly, yet effectively, like the movement of a mighty glacier down the valley, or like the waves show- ing the tide's turning, this revelation went out from the dungeon into the eager hearts and minds -of men. To Abdul Baha, as to a teacher and friend, came men and women from every race, religion, and nation, to sit at his table like favoured guests, questioning him about the social, spiritual, or moral problem each had most at heart ; and after a stay lasting from a few 172 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION hours to many months, returning home inspired, renewed, and enlightened. The world surely never possessed such a guest-house as this. Within its doors the rigid castes of India melted away, the racial prejudice of Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan became less than a memory ; every convention save the essential law of warm hearts and aspiring minds broke down, banned and forbidden by the unifying sympathy of the master of the house. It was like a King Arthur and the Round Table, to compare it with the traditional social ideal best known in our civiliza- tion ; but an Arthur who knighted women as well as men, and sent them away not with the sword, but the Word. A few thousands, per- haps, from Europe and America ; a few thousands from the East ; but these form a company bound by a great enthusiasm, a great faith, and a great gratitude. And while the visitors were spreading the teaching among friends by word of mouth, by pamphlet, by volume, Abdul Baha answered the myriad letters written by those unable to come. For years he has made use of six or more interpreters and secretaries, rising soon after midnight to begin his long dictation ; holding in his mind, like a HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 173 great chess player, the continuity of many letters, addressing now one secretary, now another, always responsive to his own inward necessity for meditation and prayer. Thus are composed the letters "tablets," as they are called among the Bahais which have gone out through the world, each one containing the solution of a personal problem together with a strong impulse toward that spiritual activity wherein all personal difficulties adjust themselves. In every response, Abdul Baha assumes the point of view of his correspondent, and employs the religious and philosophical terminology most familiar to his en- vironment, answering, that is, as the questioner's own spirit would answer if it possessed more con- scious activity. By his power to penetrate to that centre of personality at which every man's nature is open to conviction, Abdul Baha treats with all men on a plane apart, and convinces doubt or removes prejudice by making the mind work through to its own solution. His life passed in this continually increasing activity of speech and correspondence, with merely the change from Akka to Haifa and from Haifa to Alexandria, until the month of August, 1911, when he travelled westward to 174 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION visit London and Paris. He had been officially invited to represent the Bahai movement at the Universal Races Congress, held at London in July, 1911, but was unable to attend. A paper on the Bahai revelation, however, written by Abdul Baha, was delivered during the session devoted to "General Conditions of Progress"; and a reviewer afterward pointed out that this paper was the only one which presented a spiritual solution of racial problems, offering spiritual unity as the greatest human ideal, to be attained by using economic and political factors merely as the means for that end. In all other papers these factors were treated as ends in themselves. After a short stay at Thonon,* on Lake Leman, Abdul Baha continued his journey to London, arriving there during the first week in September. It is unnecessary to detail his manifold activities during the month spent there, or during the following months spent at Paris. Most conspicuous were his meeting with Mr. R. J. Campbell, when both men displayed complete sympathy and under- standing; his address to Mr. Campbell's con- gregation from the pulpit of the People's * See Appendix I. HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 175 Temple ; his address to the congregation of Archdeacon Wilberforce at St. John's, West- minster ; and a breakfast with the Lord Mayor. Daily he was visited by scores of men and women ; frequent meetings were held at which was abundantly released that impelling spirit ever felt when religion is realized as a social virtue ; and he continued his correspondence with Bahais in other countries. The one im- portant fact underlying this London visit is that all the modern sociological activity expressed by the Universal Races Congress, and all the modern passion for spiritual being expressed by the liberal Christianity of Mr. Campbell, Mr. Lewis, and Dr. Orchard, unite once and for all in Bahaism and focus perfectly in the person of Abdul Baha. In Paris, as would be expected, the meetings at his apartment were more cosmo- politan, including Hindus, Parsees, Persians, Arabs, Germans, Russians, English, French, and Americans. As London emphasized the social and spiritual aspects of Bahaism, so Paris revealed its intellectual content and unparalleled power of definition. It is this inclusiveness, of course, this sheer synthetic impulse vibrating from the Bahai teaching which enables Abdul 176 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION Baha to speak with equal authority to members of the French Academy and the Sorbonne Faculty as to an inter-racial congress, or the congregation of an active Christian church. After meeting more than one hundred and fifty persons daily for two months, besides lecturing before the Theosophical Society, at the Union des Spiritualistes, and at Pasteur Wagner's Church, he returned to Egypt in December, 1911, promising to spend the following year in travel throughout the United States. Meanwhile the Persian- American Educational Society, founded at Washington, D.C., as the result of Bahai influence to bring about closer and more sympathetic relations between East and West, made every effort to give this journey a deep and widespread effect. When Abdul Baha arrived at New York in April, 1912, more than thirty public addresses had already been arranged for various cities throughout the Union. The first speech was delivered at the Church of the Ascension at New York City, and inspired a series of favourable articles in the metropolitan press. From New York he proceeded to Wash- ington, from thence to Chicago, and during the following seven months visited a score of cities HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 177 from coast to coast. At one centre he gave the Message to a slum audience ; at another he spoke on equal suffrage before a national meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution ; at a third interpreted the real meaning of the coming of Christ to the congregation of a Jewish syna- gogue. He spoke on peace to the New York Peace Society, on international arbitration at the Lake Mohonk Conference, on the philosophy of religion to New Thought Clubs. To Free- masons, University students, Esperantists, Mor- mons, he made addresses suited to the audience and the occasion, using each meeting as a local fulcrum to further the universal cause. Among the incidents standing out in deeper relief are the laying of the cornerstone for the Bahai Temple of Unity at Chicago, and a visit made to Mr. W. J. Bryan, the present Secretary of State, at Lincoln, Nebraska, returning the visit Mr. Bryan paid Abdul Baha in Akka during the former's journey around the world. It is a matter of record that the Secretary afterwards wrote that the Bahai Movement is the only power able to revive the Islamic world, little imagining how soon that power would penetrate his own civilization. 12 178 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION On December 5 Abdul Baha sailed for England, where he passed six weeks in London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh. After two months in Paris, spent as before in daily interviews and conferences, he proceeded to Stuttgart, and held a number of very successful meetings among the loyal Bahais of Germany ; thence to Buda Pesth and Vienna, founding new centres in these places. During May, 1913, he will return to his home at Haifa, to leave it, in all probability, no more. Future historians will give Abdul Baha's journey the detail and the reflection it deserves ; but a mere outline, in relation to the preceding study, reveals even now something of its unique im- portance. " Ambassador to Humanity " was the expression used by one present at an address in Washington, and this title is perhaps as descrip- tive as any to hand. But how different the mission, how different the method, how dif- ferent the man ! If any generation could dis- tinguish out, while still living, the nature most richly and most potently endowed with its best forces, ours has that privilege. In Abdul Baha we have a mirror focusing all that is most signifi- cant, suppressing all that is irrelevant, of our time. Thus briefly I have traced the Bahai revela- HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 179 tion from its origin in the prophecy of the Bab, its manifestation by the Prophet Baha'o'llah, through its propagation by Abdul Baha. Baha- ism is now by no means confined to one personality or one region. The relation of the local reform movement in Persia to this world -wide teaching is simply that of the bent bow, which shoots abroad the penetrating arrow of truth. A cross-section of the human tree, tentatively made on May 1, 1913, shows that the Bahai influence has been felt in all the chief branches. The result of such an analysis will be approximate only, since the Bahais possess no ecclesiastical organization, and have no desire for census and display. Persia itself, to its eternal credit, contains more than a million believers. Adherence to the cause nowhere else implies so much courage and steadfastness. Though tolerating neither priesthood nor ecclesi- asticism, the Bahai revelation makes ample provision for social control of its teaching. For every city it defines a special organization to unite the followers, instruct them in practical social work, concentrate their activity, and renew their vision. A typical Bahai assembly, then, consists of a House of Justice a body of nine 180 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION men, elected by men and women alike, to counsel and advise in all matters of doubt and urgency a reading-room, open to the public, contain- ing the works of Baha'o'llah, Abdul Baha, and literature relating to the cause ; classes of instruction, held freely for all desiring to learn the meaning and importance of this revelation ; meetings for Bahais, at which are read tablets from Abdul Baha, new Bahai literature, com- munications from other assemblies, and at which speeches are delivered, especially by Bahai travellers; and finally those meetings the essential Bahai religious service where are read the words of Baha'o'llah. No order nor precedent between persons or the sexes is observed, and the Bahai services resemble those of the Quakers more than any other religious gathering known to our environment. The cause is propagated in the natural manner, by those who are moved to serve by their own impulse. Baha'o'llah taught the spiritual responsibility of every being, which renders the intervention of a paid mediating clergy not only unnecessary and impertinent, but essentially corruptive ; and he taught that every man and woman, becoming filled by true faith and love, are naturally empowered to communi- HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 181 cate their new being to others ; and that every type, class, and environment, can only be reached by its own kind. Every man carries within him the seeds of his own springtime ; and every environment contains all the tools required for its own reform. In the case of both individuals and environments, the outside world can only provide the essential preliminary instruction. Such assemblies or centres, deviating from type according to local circumstances, exist in great numbers throughout Persia, Southern Russia, India, Burma, and Egypt, where their membership includes every class, people, and sect. In the West, Bahai centres have been established in Germany, France, and England, with unorganized but increasing sentiment in Italy and Russia; while in America, as the history of the development of religious freedom would have foretold, Bahaism is especially strong. No other race has evolved so far from the deadening influence of dogma and orthodoxy, thanks to the westward impulse of popular liberty ; yet, on the other hand, no people have so completely lost the clue to mysticism and personal religious vision. Opportunity and need, therefore, meet in particularly close contact 182 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION throughout the United States and Canada the rapid spread of the Bahai teaching proves its capacity to satisfy the Western hunger for the spiritual life. In the United States more than thirty cities possess assemblies, and a constant stream of liberalizing and invigorating thought circulates from city to city and from State to State. To summarize, we find that Bahaism has taken active root from California eastward to Japan, and from Edinburgh south to Cape Town. Considering the ties which bind all the assemblies into one firm and devoted cause, we realize that they are not ecclesiastical, like those which enclose Catholic parishes within one empire of religious absolutism, neither are they ritualistic, like the Masonic fraternity, but in the fullest sense of the word they are social, includ- ing both political and spiritual necessities. Each assembly, that is, constitutes a centre where men and women engage actively in releasing the sociological forces which tend to unite nations, races, and religions into one humanity, and by learning to serve evolution they are hastening the divine civilization of the world. For Bahaism is not an isolated social fragment, badly adjusted to the myriad fragments pulling HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 183 mankind in every direction at once; it is a ferment actively at work within the fragments themselves, the expression of our modern passion for unity and reform. Every assembly is like an atlas, which in little space represents the world. The question arises whether, since the Bahai revelation excludes a clergy, it thereby excludes the Church. That an inspiring Church can exist without priesthood we know from the experience of the Quakers ; and from their history also we know that a Church of some kind is a positive necessity to secure communal firmness and power. Realizing all the advan- tages the Church offers its people, Baha'ollah left full instructions for the foundation of a temple in every community. The idea under- lying the Bahai temple is so simple, yet so pro- found, that well-informed readers will at once perceive that the temple, like every other mani- festation of the Bahai teaching, represents the climax of a social evolution perceptible in every phase of contemporary thought. In the beau- tiful Persian imagery, which even translation cannot obscure, Baha'ollah named this temple the Mashrah - el - Azkar (" Dawning-place of Prayer"). The building itself is a nine-sided 184 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION structure, surmounted by a lofty dome, and enclosed by gardens. The place of worship occupies the heart of the temple, underneath the dome, and is to be open at all hours, to all people, for meditation and silent prayer. The holy words of Baha'o'llah are chanted at intervals, but no other form of worship, and no more extensive ritual is permitted. About the hall of worship are grouped various institutions of public service, all an integral part of the temple. These consist of a college, a hospital, a hospice, and other organizations of public social benefit. The inner significance of such a temple can be gratefully appreciated by all. It means, first, the recovery and development of spiritual activity by the individual man and woman, independent of the traditional tyrannies of priest, Church, or book ; it means, next, the translation of personal holiness and aspiration into social service, the instruction and participation of men and women in the common task of reform the union, that is to say, after their long estrange- ment, of Church and State, upon the basis of true democracy. A temple completely carrying out these ideas has recently been erected at Echkabad, in Russian HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 185 Turkistan. In the West, Bahai activity has concentrated upon the construction of a similar holy place in Chicago. At the date of writing, a site has been secured overlooking Lake Michigan, and preliminary work is going for- ward upon the grounds. Once again, as in estimating the power of the Bahai revelation by the reception officially accorded Baha'o'llah's proclamation to the governments in 1868, we must not consider the material, but the spiritual content for our standard of judgment. It means nothing derogatory to the cause, therefore, that this temple has not arisen with the inconsequential ease of a Carnegie Library. On the contrary, we are forced to realize how relatively little con- trol the Western conscience has retained upon its economic activity, and gratefully acknowledge the presence of even so much disinterestedness in our civilization. It is a matter for public record that the Bahai temple at Chicago has received the first contribution ever made by the East to a Western activity ; and no thoughtful man or woman need be told that by its con- struction will be released a uniting and creative social force such as flows from no other institution of our time. PART VI THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED VI BAHAISM, then, is a religious movement ; but it cannot be compared with any previous move- ment, either in its purpose, its method, or its result. It had a local origin in Mohammedan Persia ; it was a reaction, first of all, against an immediate condition ; and in so much it is like other religious movements like Luther's Re- formation, for example. But if we once perceive the essential difference between Bahaism and the Reformation, in purpose, method, and results, we shall have entered into the very heart of this modern revelation. The Protestant Reformation implied the breaking away from an old order and the setting up of a new. The old order, however, had enough both of truth and vitality to persist, with the result that Europe is divided into two hostile religions. No man can be both Catholic and Protestant without withdrawing from both 187 188 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION organizations and, for all practicable social pur- poses, becoming neither Protestant nor Catholic. This alternative, then, is presented to every man: that he must accept one Church and consequently reject the other, or reject both and consequently lose all the advantages of co-operation with men. The alternative is hateful, vicious, and destructive, for it prevents society from enjoying the advantages of a united Church, and the individual from sharing in that deeper and more valuable truth which is now broken and divided into two ineffective parts ; yet the alternative is as inevitable as it is hateful, and no man can elect a compromise and retain his religion on a social basis. If Bahaism represented any such tendency toward disruption and division, it would be no more than another sect struggling for existence and survival in the merciless jungle of society ; but its purpose and method of operation combine to render further disintegration impossible. Its purpose is to effect the complete ultimate re- conciliation of every existing social fragment, both religious and political, and its method of operation consists in taking its stand within the institution, not outside, and pointing out the true THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 189 road of development along which the institution, by its own doctrines, if religious, or responsibility, if political, is committed to go. It is, therefore, not hostile to any creed, sect, or nation ; but is hostile only to that fatal prejudice, bigotry, and blindness which prevent creeds, sects, and nations from realizing the purpose of their own origin. Bahaism is not the enemy of any Church, for its ideal of human unity and co-operation places its hostages in every race, Church, and nation on earth ; but Bahaism is the determined and en- lightened foe of anti-evolutional forces. This must be understood first of all. To the Christian, accordingly, the Bahai teaching brings an obliga- tion to remain within the Church and to obey more fully, not less fully, the Gospel of Christ. But it does not leave him the same man as he was. It reinterprets the Christian mysteries and morals in the light of evolution and unity. The eternal virtue love, for example it strips of its local and confining manifestation, showing how that form of spiritual activity cannot be directed to members of one class, Church, or race alone, but must be directed to all men in equal measure. The existing religious situation attempts to con- fine eternal forces to narrow social areas ; but 190 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION Bahaism breaks down the frontiers that cut off one area from another. The Bahai teaching has what may be termed three moralities. It has, first, a personal morality, then a morality for institutions, and last of all a morality for society as a whole. We may take up these moralities (or, rather, these three ex- pressions of the same morality) one by one. THE INDIVIDUAL. We might define the Bahai teaching as to the personal life by stating that it is the Christian ideal, emphasized and vitalized by the purity of another prophet's vision ; but this would neces- sitate a common agreement as to what Christian- ity really is. We have too many kinds of Christianity, unfortunately, to trust the general opinion on this matter ; yet beyond and outside the traditional Churches there exists a very en- lightened attitude, which represents the modern social conscience. Bahaism insists upon the sanctity of the in- dividual, the personal right and duty to disallow any vicarious spiritual agency. Each man and woman constitutes a divine creation, and possesses a potential worth not impeached, denied, nor THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 191 humbled by that of any other human being. Self-expression, accordingly, represents the su- preme obligation and privilege ; and God has not given His precious marble of opportunity to the Michael Angelo alone. Life offers every person- ality the means of beautiful expression, in noble conduct, great thought, or inspiring art. In this individual potentiality and impulse toward self-ex- pression, all men are created free and equal. It is not too much to aver that the greater the mind and spirit, the greater the tendency to respect and admire other personalities, however they may be rated by the world ; and the inability to recognize a transcendent and incomparable possibility in every person, must be accepted as the stigma of spiritual insufficiency. Those distinctions, classifi- cations, and judgments which separate society into unsympathetic fragments, proceed from the in- tellect alone ; but intellect itself, when enlightened and vitalized by spirit, gladly perceives and adores the personality latent within all. Upon the individual, then, Bahaism enjoins his spiritual development as the purpose, and hence the supreme obligation, of life. For Baha'o'llah, also, came not to destroy but to fulfil; and while his life is a scourge terribly 192 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION uplifted against those who pollute the temple, the essential redemptory spirit of religion, as contained in pure Christianity, he reveals anew, with added intensity and clearness. Bahaism teaches that without spiritual activity all personal and social effort is sterile or self-destructive. Legislation not derived from religious vision, laws unfounded upon unselfish wisdom, merely obstruct our social evolution, and must be revised continually at uncountable vexation and expense. In his private life, moreover, the individual meets with ultimate failure if his physical and intellect- ual faculties are uncontrolled by the conscious soul. The brute-world of mere flesh and blood, and the intellectual world of mere atheism, how- ever brilliant and effective they may appear, have upon the spiritual plane no reality, and hence neither significance nor permanence. Body and mind serve only as environment agencies to soul, which has no need of them beyond this life. The immortality of soul and the omnipotent love of God constitute the foundations of the Bahai theology. Inasmuch as health and education affect the soul's useful- ness and power of development, they must be sought, in their highest possible state, by every THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 193 man and woman. Spirituality without physical or intellectual force is like the swordless warrior or a light without atmosphere. All that is requisite for self-development must be obtained and made use of. There is no essential virtue in poverty the rich man who employs his resources for health, education, and cultivation through travel and the intercourse which leisure makes possible, so long as he submits his talents to the directing control of spiritual activity, receives the assurance of Bahaism that his life is lived wisely and well. For society may confidently reckon upon this fact, that when the soul assumes authority over any human being, his personality and social advantages will thence- forth be put to public service. The greater he is in himself, and the richer he is in the world, the more power and responsibility accrue to the disposal of evolution. The point at which wealth either stupefies the soul or ceases to be serviceable to its needs, must be determined by the individual. Here again may society take confidence ; for the soul that once awakens to self- consciousness will feel more concern over its material possession than even the bitterest Socialist. The other point, the point at which 13 194 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION poverty deprives the man of opportunity and influence, this point, also, must be determined each for himself. The phenomenon underlying these facts is that spiritual activity transfers the centre of con- sciousness from self- that is, from the empire of body and mind, to an outside point. This transfer automatically changes egoism into ser- vice, releasing the world-old human passion for self-preservation and happiness, and turning its power along unselfish channels. The Bahai teaching, therefore, in its reference to the personal relationships of life, only defines and explains the operation of spiritual evolution. Authorized by its truth to eternal forces it demands, on the part of the believer, the utmost sympathy for others. It is for no man or woman to insult and despise the creations of Almighty God. The sanctity of the individual, as a spiritual fact, has its obvious counterpart in daily life, since, as we have already seen, the wretched maladjustments of our political and economic necessity derive directly from the mutual prejudice or indifference of men. Bahaism is equally explicit concerning the relationship of the individual to society. He THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 195 must sunder every tie inherently selfish, de- structive, or useless ; but he must bring new enthusiasm and faith to every necessary or con- structive relationship, and to existing responsi- bilities bring a deeper vision of their significance. He must not withdraw from present religious organizations, but reinterpreting their function in the light of evolution, endeavour to vitalize their activity, and remove the prejudice and ignorance walling them off from the social unity. As a citizen, he is bound to obey the laws of his country, whether just or foolish, labouring always, by constitutional means, to align the civil organization with creative forces and social evolution. He must labour to unite minor organizations in order to make them effective ; and to transfer the circumference of social con- sciousness from the city to the province, the province to the State, the State to the continent, and from the continent to the world. To render himself effective, he must study the social problem through the most advanced ideas in science, economics, and government ; and no duty is so important for the believer as to create for his own mind a living, passionate social ideal a picture of the divine civilization described 196 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION by Baha'o'llah and Abdul Baha toward which his purpose may direct its activity, and from which his will may be strengthened and revived. THE INSTITUTION Ethics have progressed steadily in modern times from personal morality to morality on a larger scale. With increasing resentment men perceive the futility of private morality, main- tained under terrible pressure, allied with frank immorality on the part of institutions. Honesty in Church members represents a spectacle of tragic ludicrousness, when the Churches are guilty of dishonesty as institutions. What avail, likewise, is peaceableness in citizens if nations cannot refrain from war? If Bahaism were confined to mere personal problems, it would for the most part be offering kindergarten instruction to grown men; for the ideal of personal virtue has become our racial inheritance, and has passed into our unconscious natures as a continual impulse ; while the failure to achieve personal integrity reveals an unfavourable social environ- ment, not an unwilling or untaught individual. The Bahai teaching, then, takes up the more pressing moral problem, and directs itself to a THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 197 great extent toward the larger social unit, the institution. Social ethics possess the same foundation as personal morality enlightened self-interest. Its method is to re-direct the instinct of self-preservation, which is as strong in institutions as in individuals. Every religious and political unit, in fighting desperately for its own maintenance and prosperity, insures a hostile reaction from all the rest of society. The bow and arrows which involve continual danger are no longer carried by the individual, but by the institution. Bahaism makes the same appeal to the institution that Christ made to the man to drop its offensive and defensive weapons, and entertain absolutely no thought of itself. Let Churches exert themselves to assist the religious life in men and women, without any effort to stamp that religious life with the parochial and sectarian label. It is not enough to be a Protestant one must be a Christian ; and it is not enough to be a Christian one must be a religious man or woman, unlabelled, unconfined. The unselfish attitude toward society insures a creative and co-operative reaction from every other social unit. No man except the outlaw plots against the unarmed man ; no institution 198 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION except the outlawed institution plots against the organization whose purpose and activity is inherently and wholly expressed in human service. The Red Cross Society and the Salva- tion Army, hospitably received by every civilized nation, prove this point. The political units are controlled by the same laws. Fortified frontiers insure hostility and danger from the world ; international peace insures co-operation. Unlike the Churches, however, the nations are justified in maintaining the machinery of defence until disarmament has become a general movement. Our most power- ful social forces, fortunately, are already devoted to disarmament as an international ethic ; and the Bahai teaching assists such efforts by its unparalleled effectiveness in presenting the solu- tion clearly and irresistibly, and in uniting under one head the yet unco-ordinated institutions reflecting the common desire. To sum up what I have termed its morality for institutions, Bahaism teaches that the pros- perity and permanence of any religious or political organization is not the end for our personal loyalty; that we should be indifferent to the welfare of mere institutions, creeds, stone THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 199 walls, and iron conventions ; but that our most vigorous and devoted loyalty belongs to the cause of humanity as represented by the needs of every environment. We owe a kind of loyalty, then, to institutions ; but only to the extent to which they serve men and women. To selfish institutions, to outworn organizations, we owe no loyalty ; but must learn to distinguish between the constructive and the obstructive, and resolutely leave the dead to bury their dead. SOCIETY The Bahai teaching goes far beyond the code of ethics already formulated by our civilization. Did its message stop here, it would have value, and great value, by aligning the religious impulse with the most advanced social morality ; but it would not merit consideration as the modern revelation. Its claim to this all-important title is based upon the morality Baha'o'llah formulated for society as a whole. The advance toward civilization is marked by the ever-expanding field of consciousness set up in the average mind. The frontiers of morality are not bounded by the amount of possible good or evil in men, but by the area included within 200 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION the daily workings of intelligence. This fact should be realized to its full value, for without social consciousness the consciousness, that is, whose visible expression is law, as the visible expression of personal consciousness is character there can be no more community between men than the interminable and paralyzing hostility of rank vegetation in a jungle. This area can be increased in two directions, by intensifying the individual's consciousness of his own soul, and by enriching his consciousness of other lives and other environments. In the past, religion took upon itself only the first method, which operating by itself isolates men by situating each one in a Holy of Holies. Most social forces are now working in the other direction, and the modern world brings the greater pressure to develop our social rather than our personal consciousness. While social consciousness, however, was con- fined to the individual's immediate environment, none of the disastrous effects caused by mere personal morality were apparent, and ethics accordingly remained limited and confined. Probably the greatest force available to pierce the social consciousness and reveal the play of society on a larger scale has been the Church. THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 201 The Church, however, broke through the frontiers of experience in only one direction ; and while teaching a broader morality, which linked men of the same faith in widely different environments, it set up even stricter boundaries than before between men of different faith living in the same environment. The civilizing work, however, was initiated ; men began to think in terms of more than one environment ; and nationalization, that social force alone surpassing the ecclesiastical influence, operated in a manner tending to shatter the localizing frontiers flung up by the Church. Our experience, that is, learned clearly that men of the same natural geographical or racial division owe a loyalty to that division, transcending religious considerations, under constraint of the common necessity for self-defence. Thus men were compelled to realize, in times of crisis, that the social area created by Christianity was not inclusive enough to permit the establishment and maintenance of the necessary political machinery. The army, accordingly, served to introduce into our racial consciousness just those elements of experience which the Church would willingly have destroyed ; and the continual stress exerted by the inevitable rivalry of these two civilizing 202 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION agencies has given the modern man a social consciousness whose area increases yearly with tremendous velocity, yet which is still broken in two by a certain loyalty to the contradictory claims of Church and State. Yet the point has been reached where the evil effects of institutional immorality are more and more painfully felt in our daily life, and where the correspondence between personal morality, as formulated by Christ, and social necessity, as being formulated by economics, is declaring itself to all. At this transitional condition, the Bahai teaching offers, fully developed, that universal social consciousness in which a new social morality can develop. To enter into the revelation of Baha'o'llah is to discard for ever the old parochial consciousness and absorb a consciousness race-wide and world-deep. In this field of experience the last conflicting element is done away. Co-operation displaces com- petition, and the eternal impulse toward love is supplied its ethical definition in the modern ideal of unity. Baha'o'llah created a common circumference for the local consciousness of every nation, race, and religion. He created the experience whose visible expression is a self- THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 203 conscious human society. For the first time, men from every environment can enter into one faith and identify themselves with a movement including all men and women. Hand in hand with its self-consciousness goes the new social morality. With experience is born responsibility, and the practical form our common responsibility must take is stated in Baha'ollah's works. Every step from the present competitive order to the future order of co-opera- tion has been provided for ; existing institutions and actual tendencies are merely employed with one conscious purpose, and no man is precipitated over the edge of an ideal impossible to realize in daily life. The supreme manifestation of social morality is always government, and in formulating a politic, Baha'o'llah most clearly earned our reverence as the prophet of modern society. By uniting the aristocratic spirit with the democratic form of government, he insured a politic at once equable and effective. It was long ago realized by Western historians that under a democratic State, inspired by the aristo- cratic spirit, society has revealed its noblest attributes. Democracy alone tends to vulgarize 204 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION personal values, as the United States proves, while aristocracy alone tends not only to oppress the productive classes, but to sterilize the ruling caste itself. The principle of representation insures justice to each and to all, and likewise the personal authority of superior men insures the precious leaven of magnanimity and idealism. Universal suffrage and personal superiority meet in the Bahai House of Justice. Every town elects as its local House of Justice the nine men best qualified for legislative, judicial, and execu- tive labour. The government of the county or province will be administered by a county or provincial House of Justice, and a national House of Justice, composed of abler men as its scope of operation increases, will preside over the State, with an international House of Justice, most important of all, to act upon those increas- ing problems which transcend the function of the national government. The House of Justice, indeed, whether intended for town or State, represents the outcome of our present political evolution, and BahaVllah has only defined and sanctified for men the idea already strongly though bewilderingly felt, that senates and parlia- ments are breaking down under the pressure THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 205 of modern social necessity, and that public con- trol is best secured by board or commission government. In the flux of social evolution, while popula- tions, environments, and institutions continually change, there exists only one steadfast and enduring point of contact between the individual man and woman, and this impersonal, irresistible force we call society. This point is not the institution, whether political or religious, for the introduction of new economic factors into the social stream during every generation necessitates a new personal need, and consequently a new balance of forces. The institution is too in- elastic ; it imprisons our growth as much as it benefits us. The one factor which is both permanent and elastic is office, and the supreme adequacy represented by the Bahai House of Justice cannot be realized until this fact is under- stood. Political divisions change, but humanity remains, and the link between the generations is maintained only by the integrity and respon- sibility of public office. Office transcends the individual, yet when properly established it uses him to the full extent of his ability. Authority, therefore, which is the most important attribute 206 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION in the possession of society, must be intelligently spent, for an adequate return, by each genera- tion, and the election of superior men, to offices whose integrity is a matter of universal concern, insures vitality in government, and consequently a social morality which shall invigorate the individual. Bahaism desires a new social order in which the development of spiritualized men and women shall be the primary purpose ; not supermen, whose nature is essentially hostile to the many, but that order of free beings representing our own ideals achieved in daily life and common things. To such an order we already potentially belong, and the highest human fellowship the earth will ever contain will not be otherwise than our own kind, released and inspired by participation in a co-operative society. This summary of the Bahai teaching is altogether too brief, yet in a work designed only to draw lines of connection between the present political and religious situation and this divine revelation, I have succeeded, I hope, in preparing the mind for a sympathetic study of its rich and fruitful message, and in offering an outline to be filled in by further investigation. THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 207 The Bahai attitude is so creative that proofs of its teaching are visible everywhere in the activity of men. A special literature, however, is acces- sible, and I have prepared a bibliography, given as Appendix III., which may advantageously be followed, both in its sequence and extent, with a briefer list of references for those who desire the essential facts without their historical, philo- sophical, and religious background. APPENDICES APPENDIX I A PILGRIMAGE TO THONON " ABDUL BAHA at Thonon, on Lake Leman !" This un- expected news, telegraphed through the courtesy of M. Dreyfus, brought my wife and me to the determination we had long agreed upon of making a pilgrimage to the Master at our earliest opportunity. With only a few days intervening before his journey to London, we set out immediately from our home in Siena, and arrived at Thonon in the afternoon of August 29. Prepared in some measure for the meeting by the noble mountain scenery through which we had passed, we approached the hotel feeling ourselves strangely aloof from the tourist world. If I could but look upon Abdul Baha from a distance I con- sidered that I should fulfil a pilgrim's most earnest desire. The Hotel du Pare lies in the midst of sweeping lawns. Groups of people were walking quietly about under the trees or seated at small tables in the open air. An orchestra played from a near-by pavilion. My wife caught sight of M. Dreyfus conversing with others, and pressed my arm. I looked up quickly. M. Dreyfus had recog- nized us at the same time, and as the party rose I saw among them a stately old man, robed in a cream-coloured gown, his white hair and beard shining in the sun. He displayed a beauty of stature, an inevitable harmony of attitude and dress I had never seen nor thought of in men. 211 212 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION Without having ever visualized the Master, I knew that this was he. My whole body underwent a shock. My heart leaped, my knees weakened, a thrill of acute, recep- tive feeling flowed from head to foot. I seemed to have turned into some most sensitive sense-organ, as if eyes and ears were not enough for this sublime impression. In every part of me I stood aware of Abdul Baha's presence. From sheer happiness I wanted to cry it seemed the most suitable form of self-expression at my command. While my own personality was flowing away, even while I ex- hibited a state of complete humility, a new being, not my own, assumed its place. A glory, as it were, from the summits of human nature poured into me, and I was conscious of a most intense impulse to admire. In Abdul Baha I felt the awful presence of BahaVllah, and, as my thoughts returned to activity, I realized that I had thus drawn as near as man now may to pure spirit and pure being. This wonderful experience came to me beyond my own volition. I had entered the Master's presence and become the servant of a higher will for its own purpose. Even my memory of that temporary change of being bears strange authority over me. I know what men can become ; and that single overcharged moment, shining out from the dark mountain-mass of all past time, reflects like a mirror I can turn upon all circumstances to consider their worth by an intelligence purer than my own. After what seemed a cycle of existence, this state passed with a deep sigh, and I advanced to accept Abdul Baha's hearty welcome. During our two days'* visit, we were given unusual opportunity of questioning the Master, but I soon realized that such was not the highest or most productive plane on which I could meet him. My ques- tions answered themselves. I yielded to a feeling of reverence which contained more than the solution of in- APPENDIX I 213 tellectual or moral problems. To look upon so wonderful a human being, to respond utterly to the charm of his presence this brought me continual happiness. I had no fear that its effects would pass away and leave me un- changed. I was content to remain in the background. The tribute which poets have offered our human nature in its noblest manifestations came naturally to mind as I watched his gestures and listened to his stately, rhythmic speech ; and every ideal environment which philosophers have dreamed to solicit and confirm those manifestations in him seemed realized. Patriarchal, majestic, strong, yet infinitely kind, he appeared like some just king that very moment descended from his throne to mingle with a devoted people. How fortunate the nation that had such a ruler ! My personal reverence, a mood unfortunately rare for a Western man, revealed to me as by an inspira- tion what even now could be wrought for justice and peace were reverence made a general virtue ; for among us many possess the attributes of government would only the electors recognize and summon them to their rightful station. At dinner I had further opportunity of observing Abdul Baha in his relation to our civilization. The test which the Orient passes upon the servant of a prophet is spiritual wisdom ; we concern ourselves more with questions of power and effectiveness. From their alliance from wis- dom made effectual, from power grown wise we must derive the future cosmopolitan virtue. Only now, while the East and West are exchanging their ideals, is this consummation becoming possible. Filled with these ideas, I followed the party of Bahais through the crowded dining- room. Abdul Baha, even more impressive walking than seated, led the way. I studied the other guests as we passed. On no face did I observe idle curiosity or amusement ; on 214 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION the contrary, every glance turned respectfully upon the Master, and not a few bowed their heads. Our party at this time included eighteen, of whom some were Orientals. I could not help remarking the bearing of these splendid men. A sense of well-being, of keen zest in the various activities of life without doubt the effect of their manly faith emanated from all. With this superior- ity, moreover, they combined a rare grace and social ease. All were natives of countries in which Bahaism has not only been a capital offence in the eyes of the law, but the object of constant popular hatred and persecution ; yet not one, by the slightest trace of weariness or bitterness, showed the effects of hardship and wrong upon the soul. Toward Abdul Baha their attitude was beautifully reverent. It was the relationship of disciple to master, that associa- tion more truly educative than any relation our civilization possesses, since it educates the spirit as well as the intelli- gence, the heart as well as the mind. Our party took seats at two adjoining tables. The dinner was throughout cheer- ful and animated. Abdul Baha answered questions and made frequent observations on religion in the West. He laughed heartily from time to time indeed, the idea of asceticism or useless misery of any kind cannot attach itself to this fully-developed personality. The divine element in him does not feed at the expense of the human element, but appears rather to vitalize and enrich the human element by its own abundance, as if he had attained his spiritual development by fulfilling his social relations with the utmost ardour. Yet, as he paused in profound meditation, or raised his right hand in that compelling gesture with which he emphasizes speech, I thought vividly once more of BahaVllah, whose servant he is, and could not refrain from comparing this with that other table at which a prophet broke bread. A deep awe fell APPENDIX I 215 upon me, and I looked with a sudden pang of compassion at my fellow-Bahais, for only a few hours before Abdul Baha had said that even in the West martyrs will be found for the Cause. After dinner we gathered in the drawing-room. The Master's approaching visit to London was mentioned. I recoiled momentarily as I pictured him surrounded by the terrible dehumanizing machinery of a modern city. Nevertheless, I am confident that nowhere else will BahaVllah's presence in him, as well as the principle of Bahaism, so conspicuously triumph. Precisely where our scientific industry has organized ja mechanism so powerful that we have become its slaves {^precisely where men have become less than things, and in so dwarfing ourselves have lost a certain spiritual insistence, a certain necessity to be, without which our slavery stands lamentably confirmed precisely there will the essential contrast between spirit and matter strike the observer most sharply. The true explanation of our unjust social arrangement does not consist in the subjection of poor to rich, but the subjection of all men alike to a pitiless mechanism ; for to become rich, at least in America, implies merely a readier adapta- tion to the workings of the machine, a completer adjust- ment to the revolving wheel. But Abdul Baha rises superior to every aggregation of material particles. He is greater than railroads, than skyscrapers, than trusts ; he dominates finance in its brutalist manifestation. His spiritual sufficiency, by which our human nature feels itself vindicated in its acutest agony, convinces one that the West can free itself from materialism without a social cataclysm, without civil war, without jealous and intrusive legislation, by that simplest, most ancient of revolutions, a change of heart. When by the influx of a new ideal we withdraw our obedience from the machine, its demoniac 216 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION energy will frighten no more, like a whirlwind that passes into the open sea. Abdul Baha restores man to his state a little lower than the angels. Through him we recover the soul's eternal triumph-chant I Am. Next day the Bahais, increased by other pilgrims from various parts of Europe, met again at tea. On this occasion we new-comers were presented with a Bahai stone marked with BahaVllah's name. Rightly considered, such objects contain a spiritual influence quite apart from the belief of superstition a suggestive value, which, recalling the circumstances under which the objects are given and received, actually retain and set free something of the holy man's personality. Superstition errs in reckoning their power apart from the receiver's worth or his power of receptivity. At my request, Abdul Baha graciously took back the stone I had received, and returned it with a blessing for my baby girl who thus, as it were, accompanied us on our pilgrimage and shares its benefits. I had spent the morning walking about Thonon. Follow- ing so closely upon my first meeting with the Master and the unique impression this made upon me, my walk invested the commonplace of our community life with a new significance. So much that we accept as inevitable, both in people and their surroundings, is not only avoid- able, but to the believer even unendurable ! Yet while inwardly rebelling against the idle and vicious types, the disgusting conditions in which our cities abound, I was conscious of a new sympathy for individuals and a new series of ties by which all men are joined in one common \JestinyJ Perhaps the most enduring advantage humanity derives from its prophets is that in their vision the broken and misapplied fragments of society are gathered into one harmony and design. What the historian ignores, what the economist gives up, the prophet both interprets and APPENDIX I 217 employs. The least of those who enter into a prophet's vision become thereafter for ever conscious of the in- vincible unity of men. Not himself only, but all men seem to undergo a new birth, a spiritual regenesis. I have not yet mentioned the presence of Murza Asoud Ullah. I suffered the good fortune to be seated beside him at dinner, and was irresistibly attracted by his gentle and tender spirit. Clothed in the same beautiful Persian style of garments as Abdul Baha, he represented a strik- ing contrast with the Master, as if two wines of different fragrance had been poured into similar glasses. Without Abdul Baha's majestic qualities, his nature is nevertheless infinitely sweet and lovable, inspiring a regard not exalted into impersonal awe, but full of that devotion which unites the members of a happy family. As we parted from the Bahais on this last evening, after an impressive benedictory farewell by Abdul Baha, Murza Asoud Ullah, with the most touching sweetness, approached my wife and said that he wanted to be her father ; that if she ever needed a father's help she must turn to him. Of all the heart- renewing incidents with which our little pilgrim- age was brimmed, this was the most affecting, the most significant ; for it is an example of that religious fellow- ship, deeper than race, broader than language, which Bahaism has awakened in both hemispheres, and a prophecy for the earnest days when Abdul Baha is no more, and we men and women, heirs of BahaVllah's manifestation, labour to erect the House of Justice amid the increasing charity and enthusiasm of the world. QUATTRO TORBI, SlENA, September 3, 1911. APPENDIX II A PRAYER FOR UNITY O BAHA'&LLAH, may men no linger act and hope and suffer apart from one another ! May men no longer be separated by fear and jealousy and shame, as nations are separated by strongholds and fortresses ! In our supreme affliction, when we are utterly bewildered and desolate, may we lament no more for the loneliness of life but rejoice in its Unity ^ learning with simplicity, with faith, with earnestness to look for help and consolation in all men, even our enemies. May we truly feel that every personality overlaps by a little every other personality, and to that extent is identical with it ; that every experience overlaps by a little every other ex- perience, thereby bringing all lives into sympathy; that men are not so many complete and separate existences, but are only members of one Body and loves of one Spirit. Thy manifestation of Unity, O Baha^o^llah, opens the Divine Garden to all men, even to the least and nameless outcast. He who enters by thy Gate thereafter shares every good and beautiful thing. Whoever are rich, this man benefits equally by their riches; whoever are happy, he enters into their well-being ; whoever are wise or powerful, he truly shares that power and wisdom. If a lover whispers a sweet word to his beloved, this man will hear and be glad. If a philosopher unveils a new manifestation of God, this 218 APPENDIX II 219 man will behold and worship. No blessing of earth can be hidden or withheld from him. O Baha > o' > llah ! teach us that it is better to be crushed and know Unity than be fortunate and take no heed. Teach us that the invalid who attains Unity is more capable than a strong man relying only upon himself; that he who suffers great pain continually, and learns Unity, is happier than the gayest of men who knows it not. Thou art Unity, O Baha'o'llah ! May we love Thee more than ourselves ! For surely we are not here at all, but we are in Thee. APPENDIX III BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER STUDY A Traveller's Narrative, Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Bab. E. G. Browne, Cambridge, 1891. The author, Professor of Oriental Languages at Cambridge University, became aware through his reading of a new spirit animating contemporary Persian literature, and obtained leave of absence for the purpose of studying, at first hand, the sources of this influx of imagination and power. This volume is his authoritative and dis- interested account of the Babi movement which, as we have seen, furnished the social impetus culminating in Bahaism. Professor Browne, it is interesting to record, is the only European having had personal intercourse with BahaVllah. II The Universal Religion : Bahaism. Hippolyte Dreyfus. Cope and Fen wick, London, 1909. M. Dreyfus, Docteur en Droit, Orientalist, and student of religious philosophy, has presented a brief but profound history of Bahaism, with a discussion of its social import. He presents his subject from the point of view of the most 220 APPENDIX III 221 enlightened modern knowledge. In his treatment and conclusions we see reflected that rational acceptance of religious truth which, as in the case of M. Bergson and others, is transforming the logical Gallic intellect into an instrument of ampler scope and influence. Ill Some Answered Questions. Laura Clifford Barney. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. London, 1908. This book is perhaps the most valuable of all works on the Bahai teaching. The author spent many months at Akka, having daily access to Abdul Baha, whom she questioned concerning the Bahai interpretation of religious problems. The questions and answers cover important aspects of the following topics : The Influence of the Prophets in the Evolution of Humanity ; Christian Subjects; the Powers and Manifestations of God; the Origin, Powers, and Conditions of Man ; and miscellaneous subjects of a metaphysical nature. Some Answered Questions, being the Bahai teaching interpretated for a Christian inquirer, translates this revelation into our medium of thought and feeling. It brings the European- ized Christian tradition in touch with Bahaism, and thus offers to Christians a line of logical advance within their own doctrines. IV The Hidden Words. BahaVllah. Chicago, 1905 ; Paris, 1905; London, 1911. "This is that which descended from the Source of Majesty through the Tongue of Power and Strength upon the prophets of the past. We have taken its Essences and clothed them with the Garment of Brevity as a favour to the 222 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION beloved, that they may fulfil the Covenant of God ; that they may perform in themselves that which He has entrusted to them, and attain the victory by virtue of devotion in the land of spirit." Eighty-three short sayings, with communes and prayers, which form a book of devotion ever full of impulse and revelation. V The Seven Valleys. BahaVllah. Chicago, London, Paris. In the vivid imagery of travel, BahaVllah has revealed the successive stages of spiritual evolution ; the Valley of search, the Valley of love, the Valley of wisdom, etc. It is the pure psychology, expressed by the prophet from his own discernment. VI Kitabitl Aqdas. BahaVllah. Bombay. The " Most Holy Book," the chief work of BahaVllah, dealing with society. VII Kitdbu'l Ighan. BahaVllah. Chicago. The "Book of Certainty," with explanations of the scriptures and the argument of BahaVllah. Nos. VI. and VII. include the most important elements of Bahaism. Other works of BahaVllah, however, are accessible, ex- plaining the relation of religion and science, religion and the Orthodox Church, etc. VIII The Bahai Proofs. Mirza Abul Fazl. New York, 1902. A most lucid and satisfying work for advanced students. APPENDIX III 223 IX The Mysterious Forces of Civilization. Abdul Baha. Cope and Fen wick. London. The work which most definitely marks the advance Bahaism represents over existing revelations. It is spirit- ual insight turned upon society in its permanent and transcendent capacity ; and formulates for the West its own modern social tendency. Tablets of Abdul Baha. Vol. i. Chicago, 1912. This volume, a collection of letters written by Abdul Baha in answer to questions on every aspect of religious and philosophical speculation, contains the most authori- tative and illuminating interpretation of Bahai thought. Until BahaVllah's works are fully translated, the various tablets of Abdul Baha constitute our most valuable reference. Nos. III., V., and X., compose a shorter list of references, which will reveal much of the power of the Bahai teaching. It must be understood, however, that Bahaism requires instruction and study, since all its conclusions are rationally derived and presented. 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