UC-NRLF 
 
 
 B 3 137 73b 
 
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The RED CAP 
 on THE CROSS 
 
 <•> 
 
THE RED CAP 
 ON THE CROSS 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD ROBERTS 
 
 1918 
 
 LONDON 
 
 HEADLEY BROS. PUBLISHERS, LTD. 
 
 72 OXFORD STREET 
 
 W. 1 
 

 
 3 t Wft 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 IN this book my friend the author endeavours 
 to give us a picture of the social and industrial 
 conditions prevailing throughout the civilized 
 world before and during the war. He is con- 
 vinced, as many more of us are convinced, that the 
 coming of " International Peace " will not necessarily 
 bring peace within the nations ; especially is he 
 insistent on the fact that Russia, whatever may 
 happen to her during the next few months, has 
 lighted a light or set up a beacon which will be the 
 rallying-point for the workers of the whole world. 
 Mr. Roberts, however, is one of those who believe 
 in the power of religion, plus material changes, as 
 the true motive-power for bringing about a social 
 revolution which will be satisfactory to all classes. 
 He has studied the great French reformer Lamennais, 
 and more than once quotes him as the prophet and 
 seer of a new day — a day when mankind will rest 
 its faith on love and fellowship instead of bank 
 balances and armies and navies. 
 
 The organized Churches have at all times stoned 
 the prophets and ranged themselves on the side of 
 the powerful and strong. In our day, we do not 
 find the Churches behind kings and rulers so much 
 as we discover them backing up the commercial 
 system with its mighty money magnates, who have 
 displaced courts and kings as the real rulers of 
 mankind. In every labour dispute with very few 
 exceptions the exponents of orthodoxy are ranged on 
 the side of the masters, and at great pains declare 
 that as the message of the Church is to rich and 
 
6 FOREWORD 
 
 poor, it is therefore impossible for Christians to take 
 sides. It is this negative policy which creates the 
 divorce between organized labour and organized 
 religion. Gold and the love of gold has usurped 
 the power of the Cross. In the City of London 
 we gild the towers of St. Paul's with gold, and over 
 the Old Bailey Sessions House we have erected a 
 figure of Justice clothed in gold, thus demonstrating 
 to the whole world our worship of the metal for 
 the possession of which men sacrifice honour, truth, 
 and justice. The redemption of mankind will not 
 be effected by a mere material change in our outlook. 
 No sort of theory of life can save us, short of a com- 
 plete self-surrender of all those things in life which 
 hurt our neighbours and destroy our own souls ; 
 for the worst thing in modern life is not that each 
 one of us is engaged in a struggle which injures our 
 neighbours, but in that struggle our own souls are 
 lost. Everything that is good and pure and holy 
 in life is sacrificed on the altar of the golden calf. 
 Some people imagine our present-day problems 
 are new. They are, in fact, as old as the hills. In 
 the story of Cain and Abel, we are told that Cain 
 cried out with some bitterness, " Am I my brother's 
 keeper ? " We all know how according to the story 
 Cain failed, but we also know that, whether we like it 
 or not, our lives and the lives of our fellow men are 
 bound together in such a manner that we cannot 
 live for ourselves alone, and that in very deed we are 
 our brother's keeper ; and it is the refusal of mankind 
 to understand this which is accountable for much of 
 the sorrow and misery of our day, and results, too, in 
 all of us first gathering the dead- sea fruit of joyless- 
 ness instead of the fruit of joy and happiness which 
 
FOREWORD 7 
 
 must come to all who strive, however humbly, to 
 follow the light which Christ came to give the world. 
 It is this fact which needs pressing home. We 
 cannot live to ourselves or die to ourselves. That 
 is the law of life which Jesus came to teach. His 
 was no narrow creed for a sect, a class, or a race, 
 but an all-embracing gospel of universal brother- 
 hood which was to draw all men and women unto 
 Him. We all have sinned and come short of the 
 glory of God. It is this fact v/hich all the Churches 
 must understand. Great crimes and outrages have 
 been committed during this war by the Germans 
 and other belligerents ; but the crimes of war are 
 as nothing to the crimes of peace — indeed, they are 
 but dust in the balance compared with the load 
 of sorrow and suffering which accompanies humanity 
 from the cradle to the grave. It may well be that 
 in days long ago much suffering and sorrow was 
 unavoidable — men were ignorant and stupid ; but 
 to-day there is no reason why the sweating and slavery 
 of industrial life should persist, when all around 
 us there are the means to our hand for averting 
 the plague and consequences of poverty. W r e also 
 know enough now to understand that outraging 
 nature's laws by sexual and other excesses brings, 
 and must bring, its own punishment ; that in these 
 matters it is true, whether we like to admit it or 
 no, " the sins of the fathers are visited on the 
 children." 
 
 To whom and to what, then, shall we turn ? 
 Mr. Roberts bids us all turn once more to the Cross. 
 In doing so, let us each bear in mind the words of 
 Jesus : " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
 all men unto Me." This is the true meaning of the 
 
8 FOREWORD 
 
 Cross, typifying for us all Life, not Death. He 
 whom we believe was the Son of God is for us not 
 slain, not dead, but living to give inspiration and 
 help to all those who will turn to Him ; it is this 
 message which this book has to give. It is no 
 fancy picture which Mr. Roberts puts before us 
 when he tells us to think of the Red Cap on the 
 Cross, for what is it the red cap symbolizes for 
 those of us who to the best of our ability are striving 
 to learn from Christ how to live ? Surely it means 
 the oneness of human life, the sacredness of each 
 man and woman, the breaking down of all barriers, 
 revealing mankind as neither Jew nor Greek, bond 
 nor free, but one great family of one blood the 
 world over. 
 
 Some people think the Christian religion has 
 seen its best days. I have more faith. The 
 services and ritual of the Anglican Church have 
 for me a purpose and a meaning that many who 
 read this book will not appreciate ; but I can also 
 see quite clearly that the true object of religion is 
 to be found in the souls of men, that the divisions 
 which send each of us into his own little sect or party 
 are irrational and unreal. These divisions very often 
 result in our forgetting the aims and objects our 
 organizations are established to support, and w T e find 
 ourselves more concerned for the safety of the 
 organizations than concerned about the propagation 
 and practice of the principles of life and conduct we 
 profess to hold sacred. The dividing line is not 
 in what place shall I worship God, or with what 
 liturgy shall I praise Him, but instead, we must 
 each discover how to serve God out in the open 
 in our daily lives. All ways but one have been tried 
 
FOREWORD 9 
 
 We have never yet, either as individuals or as nations, 
 tried the way laid down in the Gospels. The war 
 has only accentuated the moral and spiritual bank- 
 ruptcy of us all. The day when Peace is signed 
 will find us still more bankrupt, unless there is a 
 stirring of the dry bones of Christianity. Some- 
 times I wonder if there can be any life left in the 
 Churches which masquerade as followers of Christ. 
 My faith always returns when I remember the con- 
 scientious objectors, and the men, like Rupert Brooke 
 and many a thousand more, who followed the light 
 of conscience and went out to fight. The power 
 of the Spirit, the tremendous power of the Cross 
 with its emblem of love, is still the one redeem- 
 ing force in the world. Those of us who profess 
 and call ourselves Christians must shake off 
 our lethargy, give up our comfort, our leisure, 
 and go out with the banner of the Cross and its 
 red cap of revolution — a revolution not of violence 
 and bloodshed, but of mind and spirit — declaring 
 our faith that He whose preaching attracted 
 the common people two thousand years ago still 
 lives, still calls to us with the same message, " Come 
 unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, 
 and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, 
 and learn of Me : for I am meek and lowly in 
 heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For 
 My yoke is easy and My burden is light." I think 
 this is absolutely true. We modern people are much 
 too superior, we are constantly wanting some big 
 thing to do. Christ says to us, Come and learn of 
 Me how to live, how to gain disciples, by doing as He 
 did, love and give ourselves to the service of God by 
 serving our fellow men and women. We must realize 
 
io FOREWORD 
 
 that what we give we in reality keep, that we take we 
 lose. The true law of life and happiness is service 
 and giving. We are all weary and heavy laden with 
 the cares and failures of our lives, and Christ's message 
 is ringing down the ages calling us to turn to Him, 
 and salvation will never come till we not only hear 
 His message, but from our hearts cry out, " Lord, I 
 believe; help thou my unbelief." None of us are 
 pure, none good, but all of us can, by accepting 
 Christ's call, learn from Him what satisfaction and 
 gladness in life means, for religion is the one sure means 
 we have of securing joy and happiness in life. We 
 may sketch all sorts of fancy schemes, endeavour to 
 attract men by promises of legislation ; in the end 
 we shall find that the pursuit of selfish happiness — 
 that is, the endeavour to find salvation alone, separate 
 and by ourselves — always fails, that indeed we must 
 each seek happiness in the happiness of others and 
 discover the true revolution in our own hearts and 
 consciences. We need not fear the red cap or the 
 red flag, for both come down to us from the Cross 
 of Christ, and are both symbols of the day " when 
 the glory of God shall cover the earth as the water 
 covers the sea " ; and the glory of God will find its 
 highest expression once more, as it did two thousand 
 years ago, in the life and work of man. 
 
 I hope those who read the splendid message of 
 Mr. Roberts will be inspired to join the growing 
 army of those who, because of their creed, their faith 
 in the life, death, and life again of Christ, are deter- 
 mined to live and work for the day when the will of 
 God will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 
 
 GEORGE LANSBURY. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 THE title of this volume is borrowed from a 
 witty description of Lamennais's great psalm 
 of Revolution, Paroles d'un Croyant. An 
 apology is needed for the presumption which 
 connects these halting pages with the flaming utter- 
 ance of the French prophet ; and it is hereby un- 
 reservedly made. But I may perhaps be suffered 
 to plead in extenuation that no other title would 
 have so precisely stated the aim of my little book. 
 And here I would like to add that the reader will 
 find that the book owes a good deal more than its 
 title to Lamennais. A recent study of his writings 
 has convinced me that there are few men, living 
 or dead, who have a message more pertinent to 
 the need of our time. 
 
 Some years ago I wrote a book which was pub- 
 lished under the title The Renascence of Faith. In 
 that book I argued that the signs and movements 
 of the time justified the hope that we were about 
 to enter upon a new age of faith. I did not anticipate 
 that the world was first to be engulfed in the terrible 
 calamity of a great war, though (so easy is it to be 
 wise after the event) I now perceive how inevitably 
 certain of the circumstances which I passed under 
 review were tending towards this unspeakable 
 tragedy. Nevertheless, I believe that the general 
 thesis of The Renascence of Faith still holds good, 
 despite the war ; and this present volume is intended 
 to be in some sort a postscript to it. 
 
 But its aim is more specific. It assumes that 
 the dominating fact of the present moment is the 
 
 proletarian rising which has begun in Russia, and 
 
 ii 
 
12 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 of which there are plain signs in every country of 
 Western Europe. This movement may in a com- 
 paratively short time work such changes through- 
 out Western civilization as to render the political 
 adjustments which will be made at the end of the 
 war as archaic and obsolete as pre-war conditions 
 appear to-day. What are we going to do about it ? 
 While I have in these pages confined myself to 
 the spiritual and moral conditions of the creation 
 of a new society, I should like to be permitted to 
 say that I believe its economic framework must 
 take some such shape as that described by the 
 advocates of " national guilds." 
 
 RICHARD ROBERTS 
 January 1918. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FOREWORD .... 
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 PROLOGUE— FROM LUTHER TO LENIXE 
 
 I. THE COURSE OF CIVILIZATION' . 
 
 II. FROM FAITH THROUGH SCEPTICISM TO 
 
 III. THE NEW FIGHT FOR FREEDOM 
 
 IV. THE LEAVEN IN THE LUMP 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. THE DISINHERITED 
 
 I. THE SCHISM OF THE AGES 
 II. TOP-DOG AND UNDER-DOG 
 III. THE GOAL OF THE NEW INSURGENCY 
 
 II NEW CLOTHES OR A NEW BODY ? 
 
 I. THE MELTING-POT 
 
 II. CIVILIZATION ? 
 
 III. THE SCRAP-HEAP AND THE SHAMBLES 
 
 IV. WHAT WILL THE NEW ORDER BE ? 
 
 III. THE COEFFICIENT OF FREEDOM 
 
 I. THE INWARDNESS OF LIBERTY . 
 
 II. AUTHORITY THE DENIAL OF LIBERTY 
 
 III. THE WILL TO FELLOWSHIP 
 
 [IV. DEMOCRACY, ITS FAILURE AND THE REMEDY 
 
 IV. CHANGE OF HEART 
 
 i I. REVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 II. THE MORAL TRAGEDY OF THE WORLD 
 
 III. SJN AS EGOISM 
 
 IV. MORAL REVOLUTION 
 
 13 
 
 MATERIALISM 
 
 PAGE 
 5 
 
 II 
 
 15 
 
 '5 
 17 
 
 20 
 
 22 
 
 27 
 
 27 
 29 
 
 34 
 
 38 
 
 38 
 40 
 42 
 48 
 
 5i 
 
 5i 
 
 55 
 60 
 
 64 
 
 70 
 70 
 
 73 
 78 
 85 
 
14 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 V. THE NEW MAN 
 
 I. THE GOSPEL OF " BENEFITS " 
 
 II. CREATING MORAL PERSONALITY 
 
 III. CONVERSION AS EMANCIPATION 
 
 IV. CONVERSION AS VISION . 
 
 V. NEW VALUES AND NEW RELATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 8 9 
 
 89 
 
 91 
 96 
 
 99 
 102 
 
 VI. JUDGMENT AND MERCY . 
 
 I. THE NECESSITY OF THE CROSS . 
 II. THE CROSS THE CENTRE OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 . 108 
 . 109 
 • 115 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 I. TO THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 II. TO THE PEOPLE . 
 
 . Il8 
 . Il8 
 . 123 
 
PROLOGUE 
 
 FROM LUTHER TO LENINE 
 
 I. — The Course of Civilization 
 
 NEWMAN once delivered a course of lectures 
 on the Turks which are still worth reading 
 for the sake of a theory of civilization which 
 he proposes in them. He sets out with the 
 antithesis* that " barbarous nations live in a common 
 imagination . . . whereas civilized states live in 
 some common object of sense." Civilization is, 
 accordingly, the process by which society passes 
 from a state in which it is held together by an object 
 of the imagination, such as " religion, true or false, 
 the divine mission of the sovereign or the dynasty, 
 historical fame," to a state in which it is sustained 
 by a common devotion to some object of sense, 
 " secular interests, country, home, protection of 
 person and property." Newman explains the 
 transition in this way : " Taking man as he is, we 
 shall commonly find him dissatisfied with a demon- 
 strative process from an undemonstrated premiss ; 
 and when once he has begun to reason, he will seek 
 
 ! to prove the point from which the reasoning starts 
 as well as that at which it arrives. Then he will 
 
 | be forced back from immediate first principles to 
 others more remote, nor will he be satisfied till 
 he ultimately reaches those that are as much within 
 
 I his own handling and mastery as the reasoning 
 
 jj apparatus itself. Hence it is that civilized states 
 
 1 ever tend to substitute objects of sense for the 
 
 15 
 
16 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 objects of imagination as the basis of their 
 existence/' 
 
 Despite this analysis, Newman curiously had 
 little fault to find with civilization. He acknowledges 
 that it lacks the " supernatural grace " which only 
 " can raise man towards the perfection of his nature." 
 Yet even without the cultivation of the spiritual 
 nature, it is possible " in some sort to combine the 
 other faculties of man into one and to progress 
 forward, with the substitution of natural religion 
 for faith, and a refined expediency or propriety for 
 true morality, just as with practice a man might 
 manage without an arm or without sight, and as 
 the defect of one organ is sometimes supplied to a 
 certain extent by the preternatural action of another." 
 One wonders whether, had Newman lived to see this 
 day, he would have looked upon the processes of 
 civilization with so great complacency. 
 
 Edward Carpenter describes civilization as a 
 " historical stage whose commencement dates roughly 
 from the division of society into classes founded 
 upon property and the adoption of class govern- 
 ment." Engels points out the connection of 
 the appearance of a merchant-class with the growth 
 of civilization. Whether Newman's account of the 
 transition is sound or not — and it is probable that 
 he exaggerates the part played in it by conscious 
 ratiocination — it is plain that society does pass from 
 a primary state of devotion to objects of imagination 
 to an ultimate state governed by the " economic " 
 motive. But Newman seemingly failed to perceive 
 that when a society is held together by a common 
 pursuit of objects of^sense, it has reached its term. 
 
From LUTHER to LENINE 17 
 
 > t 
 
 In no case ' says Edward Carpenter after citing 
 instances, " has any nation come through and 
 passed this stage ; but in most cases it has succumbed 
 soon after the main symptoms had been developed." 
 
 II. — From Faith through Scepticism to 
 Materialism 
 
 To put it summarily, a civilization (according to 
 Newman) passes through three stages : the first, of 
 faith ; the second, of analysis and scepticism ; the 
 third and last, of materialism. 
 
 It would take us too far afield to inquire how far 
 Newman's theory is universally valid, but we may 
 observe how closely it fits the case of the modern 
 world. 
 
 It is now four hundred years since Luther nailed 
 the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle 
 Church at Wittenberg ; and the echo of his hammer 
 has been much fainter than, even amid these assaults 
 and alarms of war, it ought to have been. For, 
 so far as it is possible to fix a point of time for so 
 great a happening, the modern world began with 
 the Theses. A principle had emerged from the 
 decaying welter of the Middle Ages which unlocked 
 the door of a new world. The Protestant Refor- 
 mation was indeed a good many things ; but before 
 anything else it was a revival of religion. That it 
 finally established the modern tradition of the 
 " national state," and is so far the source of much 
 of the weal and woe which followed the new political 
 divisions of Christendom, is not of so much conse- 
 
 2 
 
18 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 quence as its central affirmation of the doctrine of 
 personal autonomy in matters of faith. Through 
 this doctrine, the spiritual universe was in some 
 sort rediscovered ; the supernatural gained a fresh 
 reality, a hitherto unknown immediacy ; and the 
 Reformation shaped itself in its early stages as a 
 great resurgence of spiritual life. It was, indeed, 
 no new thing that had come into the world — but 
 an old thing, stated with an accent and with a power 
 which the need of the time called for ; and those 
 who accepted it pressed with a joyful violence into 
 an astonishing land of enlarged life and unexpected 
 experience. 
 
 But after the age of faith came the age of scepti- 
 cism — the sceculum rationalisticum. This was the 
 period of English Deism, of the Aufklarung, and of 
 the Encyclopaedia ; and its effect was to disintegrate 
 the religious synthesis which began with the Refor- 
 mation. Belief in the validity of revealed religion 
 was undermined ; and the new world of faith that 
 had been thrown open in the sixteenth century had 
 become doubtful and unsure by the beginning of 
 the eighteenth. The Methodist Revival came too 
 late to arrest the decomposition ; all it succeeded in 
 doing was to give the dwindling faith in a super- 
 natural order a local revival without materially 
 checking the general drift towards the ascendancy 
 of " objects of sense." 
 
 The third age followed — the sceculum realisticum, 
 the age of things ; and it was fitly borne in upon 
 the heaving flood of the Industrial Revolution. 
 From that time the modern world has capitulated 
 increasingly to " objects of sense," and life has 
 
From LUTHER to LENINE 19 
 
 been materialized to an extent and a depth hitherto 
 unknown. It is true that the nineteenth century 
 has been marked by many notable achievements ; 
 and much progress was made in the humanities. 
 Nations were delivered from ancient bondage and 
 set up on their own account ; slaves were set free ; 
 the area of political freedom was extended ; these 
 and many more good things. But these things 
 were the belated outcrops of a previous tradition 
 rather than the achievements of the prevailing spirit. 
 The nineteenth century, especially in its later un- 
 foldings, was pre-eminently an age of commercialism ; 
 the economic motive became paramount. Mind 
 was given over to the pursuit of scientific invention 
 and technical achievement, and in due course sub- 
 ordinated to the purposes of commerce and war ; 
 and the spirit of the century came to its most appro- 
 priate and inevadible chmax in the world-wide 
 expansion of that commercial imperialism, which 
 has chiefly governed the external relations of states, 
 and more than any other single cause is accountable 
 for this present lapse into barbarism. 
 
 So the age has come full cycle. Allowing for an 
 occasional parenthesis of spiritual recovery and a 
 few scattered cases of idealism, the period which 
 began with the Reformation has run its course from 
 faith through scepticism to materialism ; and it 
 is winding up its bankrupt affairs in this inferno 
 of blood and tears. The world that was born in 
 15 17 is being buried before our eyes in a tragical 
 setting of destruction and death ; and it is being 
 buried beyond resurrection. 
 
20 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 III. — The New Fight for Freedom 
 
 ■ 
 
 It is of course impossible to delimit in a summary 
 way the historical frontiers of an epoch. The 
 Reformation was as much a result as a beginning : 
 and while it is legitimate to mark out certain broad 
 periods as having been characterized by this or that 
 particular tendency, it is necessary to remember the 
 principle of historical continuity which links one 
 generation to another without any real break. The 
 roots of a new tradition are already present in the 
 old ; and this is the energy — partly a development 
 out of the past, and for the rest a reaction from it — 
 which pressing and working for its own release 
 disintegrates and shatters the existing synthesis. 
 Is it possible to perceive through the dust and smoke 
 and darkness of this ruined world, the principle 
 which is to shape and govern the affairs of men in 
 the time before us ? 
 
 The Protestant affirmation of individual liberty 
 in the religious sphere paved the way for its estab- 
 lishment in other regions. It is a historical common- 
 place how the struggle for civil liberty in modern 
 times has grown out of the experience of spiritual 
 liberty. Imperfectly and only partially discerned, 
 yet the principle of religious freedom became in the 
 Puritan and the Pilgrim the real source of the move- 
 ment which has extended, through generation after 
 generation, the area of civil freedom ; and of this 
 movement the French Revolution was the terrific 
 climax. Mazzini held rightly that the French 
 Revolution was the political translation of the 
 Protestant Reformation, the affirmation in the 
 
From LUTHER to LENINE 21 
 
 political sphere of that liberty which the Refor- 
 mation proclaimed in the realm of religion ; and 
 when we remember that the spiritual background 
 of the intellectual father of the French Revolution, 
 Jean- Jacques Rousseau, was Genevan Protestantism, 
 Mazzini's generalization would appear to be not ill- 
 founded. Following the French Revolution came 
 (despite occasional reactions) the extended appli- 
 cation of the principle of political liberty to nations 
 and to individuals. It has been said that the nine- 
 teenth century was the century of nationality ; 
 it was no less the century of democracy. In the 
 great mid-century struggles for emancipation, the 
 nationalist ideal was hardly distinguishable from 
 the democratic. But while the area of political liberty 
 was thus being extended, a new problem was being 
 created by the growth of commercial and industrial 
 individualism. A new tyranny and a new form of 
 subjection appeared ; and we are now at the begin- 
 ning of a conflict to extend the principle of liberty 
 into a third sphere, namely, the economic. The 
 Protestant Reformation abolished the vested inter- 
 ests of a priestly caste ; the French Revolution 
 abolished the vested interests of a political caste ; 
 a revolution is already afoot which will abolish the 
 vested interests of an economic caste — that social 
 synthesis which is called " capital." Religious 
 liberty was affirmed against privilege resting upon 
 an alleged monopoly of grace ; political liberty was 
 affirmed as against privilege resting upon birth ; 
 the new liberty will be affirmed against privilege 
 resting upon property. 
 
 This is, at this moment, no mere speculation ; 
 
22 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 for the struggle has already begun. This is the 
 significance of the Russian Revolution. What has 
 happened in Russia is not an old-time political 
 upheaval ; the overthrow of the old order was simply 
 an incident in the overthrow of economic privilege. 
 This is a new thing in the world ; for the first time 
 a disinherited class has gained an ascendancy not 
 alone over an aristocracy (for that has often happened 
 before) but over a bourgeoisie as well. A proletariat 
 is in possession ; and its mind is to set up a new 
 order of economic equality. This event may turn 
 out to be the third great crisis of modern history, 
 the first act in the drama of economic emancipation. 
 
 IV. — The Leaven in the Lump 
 
 Nor is the Russian Revolution an isolated episode 
 out of relation to the prevailing tendencies in the 
 rest of the world. Industrial unrest was epidemic 
 throughout Europe before the war ; and the war has 
 served to give it a unity and a definition which it did 
 not previously possess. Lord Northcliffe, who has 
 not been distinguished b}' his proletarian sympathies, 
 told an American interviewer a little time ago that 
 the war would be followed by " the greatest social 
 revolution in British history, greater even than 
 Magna Charta, the Civil War, or the Reform Bill 
 of 1832." But it is altogether sure that Lord 
 Northcliffe has no understanding of the dimensions 
 and depth of the forces which are making for the 
 revolution he foresees. Mr. Bert Moses, a keen 
 and shrewd American observer, a leading figure in 
 
 / 
 
From LUTHER to LENINE 23 
 
 the advertising world, has recorded his conviction 
 in these terms — 
 
 Getting back to where I started — to the New York election 
 — the amazing vote cast for Hillquit, the Socialist, may be 
 a strong indication of the drift of the world toward Socialism. 
 Personally, I believe that Socialism, rather than democracy, 
 is going to sweep over the earth much sooner after the war 
 ends than most folks imagine. 
 
 If you think, when the war ends, the world is going to be 
 what it was early in 19 14, your mind is not in good working 
 order. Socially, commercially, and intellectually changes of 
 such magnitude are coming that you will have to get an 
 introduction to yourself to recognize your own name, and 
 you will hardly be able to identify your home city or town. 
 Put your ear to the ground and you can hear the distant 
 rumble of footsteps echoing across the world — footsteps of 
 the followers of Hillquit in New York and Hillquits all over 
 the globe. Get ready for big surprises. Prepare for great 
 changes. They are just over the horizon — just around the 
 corner. This isn't one man's opinion. Millions of men in 
 both hemispheres are consumed with this idea. They believe 
 in Socialism with a fanaticism that waxes mightily. I am 
 simply recording in cold blood the march of events past the 
 grandstand. 
 
 Mr. John Hill, a fraternal delegate from the British 
 Trade Union Congress, said to the convention of 
 the American Federation of Labour at Buffalo on 
 November 15, 1917 — 
 
 That this war generally arises out of the imperialistic 
 efforts of kings and emperors for a larger portion of the earth's 
 surface in the capitalist interests, to control an even larger 
 proportion of the production of the workers' toil, and that 
 all nations shared in the responsibility of this war ; that 
 below all intrigues are the capitalist interests, and unless we 
 
24 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 emancipate ourselves from the domination of capitalism there 
 will be no real democracy after the war, is the position of 
 the English workers. 
 
 Nor is it in England only or chiefly that even 
 these things are being said. They are the common- 
 places of radical utterance in France and Italy ; 
 and despite the shroud of mystery that hides from 
 us the inner life of Germany to-day, there are un- 
 mistakable signs that Liebknecht is no voice in 
 the wilderness when he says — as he did at his trial — 
 
 The present war is not a war for the protection of national 
 integrity, nor for the freeing of oppressed people, nor for the 
 welfare of the masses. 
 
 It signifies from the standpoint of the proletariat the most 
 extreme concentration and extension of political oppression, 
 of economic exploitation, of militaristic slaughtering of the 
 working-classes, body and soul, for the advantage of capital- 
 ism and despotism. 
 
 To all this the working-classes of all countries can give 
 only one answer : intensified struggle — international class 
 struggle against the capitalistic regime and the ruling classes 
 of all countries for the abolition of every species of oppression 
 and exploitation, for the termination of war through the 
 institution of a peace consistent with the spirit of Socialism. 
 In this class struggle the Socialist; who knows no country 
 but the International, must come to the defence of every- 
 thing which he as a Socialist is bound to defend. 
 
 Perhaps the most eloquent footnote to these 
 words of Liebknecht is this message which I take 
 from that grim essay in realism, Henri Barbusse's 
 Under Fire — 
 
 Bertrand used to speak very little ordinarily and never 
 of himself. But he said : "I've got three of them on my 
 
From LUTHER to LENINE 25 
 
 hands. I struck like a madman. Ah, we were all beasts 
 when we got here ! " 
 
 He raised his voice and there was a restrained tremor in 
 it. " It was necessary," he said, " it was necessary for the 
 future's sake." 
 
 He crossed his arms and tossed his head. " The future ! " 
 he cried all at once as a prophet might. " How will they 
 regard this slaughter, they who'll live after us, to whom 
 progress — which comes sure as fate — will at last restore the 
 poise of their conscience ? How will they regard these 
 exploits which even we who perform them don't know whether 
 one should compare them with those of Plutarch's and 
 Corneille's heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches ? 
 
 " And for all that, mind you," Bertrand went on, " there 
 is one figure that has risen above the war and will blaze with 
 the beauty and strength of his courage. . . ." 
 
 I listened, leaning on a stick and towards him, drinking 
 in the voice that came in the twilight silence from the lips 
 that so rarely spoke. He cried with a clear voice, " Liebknecht." 
 
 This is the leaven which is heaving and panting 
 in the lump to-day beneath the exterior chaos of 
 the war. The lineaments of the movement are 
 unmistakable ; and it is gathering volume daily. 
 And the issue, what is that to be ? 
 
 The wars of religion came to an end long ago ; 
 this is assuredly the last of the politico-dynastic 
 wars — if only for the reason that the politico- 
 dynastic interests that led up to it have already 
 become irrelevant. The nation-consciousness is in 
 process of being effaced by a class-consciousness 
 which reaches out far and wide beyond the terri- 
 torial divisions of mankind. Are we then beginning 
 an era of economic wars — wars in which the old 
 vertical division of nationality will be replaced by 
 the horizontal divisions of class ? 
 
26 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 A revolution is at hand ; but when it comes, will 
 it be a dance of death or a pageant of life ? 
 
 This is the problem which the Christian Church 
 has to face. It is confronted with the alternative 
 — new wars or a new religious synthesis. Has it a 
 word with which to face the tremendous emergencies 
 that are at hand ? 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE DISINHERITED 
 
 I. — The Schism of the Ages 
 
 TH E struggle for liberty has always been 
 essentially an endeavour to broaden the 
 basis of human fellowship, to enlarge the 
 area of opportunity and privilege ; and 
 the destructive aspects of the struggle have 
 been subsidiary and incidental to this positive 
 purpose. Luther sought to bring the disinherited 
 layman into his own ; the French Revolution brought 
 the disinherited citizen into his own ; Mazzini fought 
 for the unity and independence of a disinherited 
 people. The mainspring of all organized opposition 
 to constituted authority is to be found in the sense 
 of disinheritance and unjust disability ; and the 
 great historical rebels have been simply men of 
 larger social vision than their orthodox contempor- 
 aries. Like Jesus, they saw the multitude, ' scat- 
 tered abroad as sheep having no shepherd," dis- 
 tressed and overborne by the predatory self-regard 
 of the privileged classes. " Rousseau," says Lord 
 Morley, " had seen the wrongs of the poor not from 
 without but from within, not as a pitying spectator 
 but as of their own company," and that was how "he 
 by and by brought such fire to the attack of the old 
 order and changed the blank practice of the older 
 philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell." 
 Similarly, Professor Dowden has said of Shelley 
 that " it was the sufferings of the industrious poor 
 
 that especially claimed his sympathy, and he thought 
 
 27 
 
28 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 of publishing for them a series of popular songs 
 which should inspire them with heart and hope." 
 It has, moreover, been characteristic of the rebel 
 that he had not only a heart for the misery of the 
 disinherited but a profound faith in their power 
 to redeem themselves. Robert Owen went so far 
 — despairing of the State as an instrument of social 
 regeneration — as to preach a doctrine of political 
 indifferentism and started the co-operative move- 
 ment in the faith that the common people had it 
 in them to work out their own salvation without 
 the aid of statecraft. Lamennais, disappointed in 
 the Monarchy and the Church, at last gave himself 
 over wholly to the direct appeal to the people. John 
 Ball's doggerel, John Wyclif's tracts and " poor 
 preachers," Hus's appeal to the Bohemians, the 
 practice of public preaching at the Reformation, 
 Pascal's Provincial Letters, John Brown's quaint tract 
 for negroes, each of these was in its own way a call 
 to the disinherited to claim their inheritance, and 
 was born of the faith that the multitude had only 
 to press its claim in order to win it. And at last, 
 though there be many vicissitudes by the way, 
 that pressure is not to be withstood. The crusade 
 of freedom does not move continuously and simul- 
 taneously along the whole front. The Bible of 
 Liberty is written slowly, line upon line, precept 
 upon precept, here a little, there a little. At this 
 point or that, in every age, the disinherited have 
 swept over the barricades of privilege ; and the 
 sovereign fact of these times is that a disinherited 
 class is getting ready for the heaviest and farthest- 
 flung offensive yet undertaken against the monopolies 
 
The DISINHERITED 29 
 
 which deny it its just share of the joy and the fullness 
 of life. 
 
 " The poor," said Jesus, " ye have always with 
 you." Indeed we have ; and their masters too. 
 The top-dog and the under-dog have ever been here. 
 The fabric of the Greek city with a^l its fine boasting 
 of liberty rested upon the subordination of a slave 
 class. Disraeli once spoke of the " two nations ' 
 that inhabited England. There were the govern- 
 ing classes and the governed ; and the governed 
 were governed in the interests of their governors. 
 On the one hand, tyrannies, despotisms, oligarchies 
 and plutocracies ; on the other, chattel-slavery and 
 serfdom, villenage and wage-servitude ; there the 
 privileged few ; here the disinherited many — this 
 schism has been the ancient curse of our race. 
 
 II. — Top-dog and Under-dog 
 
 The case of the disinherited man of to-day differs 
 in more than one way from that of his historical 
 ancestors. He is not concerned with his disabilities 
 as a layman, or as a citizen, or as a member of a 
 subject nation. He has largely ceased to be inter- 
 ested in religion ; and his concern in politics, whether 
 national or international, is dominated by one fact 
 — namely, that he conceives of himself primarily as 
 a working-man denied his due share of the product 
 of his toil, compelled to live from hand to mouth, 
 possessing no fixity of tenure, liable to lose his job 
 at the caprice of another man. This condition he 
 calls wage-slavery ; and he is justified in so calling 
 it, since it puts him and his family at the mercy of 
 
30 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 an irresponsible master against whose decree there 
 is no appeal. It will serve little purpose at this time 
 of day to say dark and stormy things about the 
 social revolutionary. This thing is not to be killed 
 with the mouth. If the privileged class were wise 
 in its day, it would try to make terms with this 
 adversary " while it is in the way with him." But 
 historical precedent does not encourage us to look 
 for such wisdom. On the contrary, the privileged 
 classes will show fight, and they will be beaten ; 
 and they will by no means come out of their defeat 
 till they have paid the uttermost farthing. 
 
 Some one has said that the only real agitator is 
 injustice ; and if there is any social ferment about, 
 it must have a real cause. It is the part of the wise 
 man to regard it as the symptom of some organic 
 disease in the body politic and to endeavour to 
 diagnose the trouble. Nor is it ever difficult for a 
 candid mind to reach the seat of the disease. The 
 spiritual inwardness of labour unrest is a demand 
 for a larger life ; and this demand has been set afoot 
 by education. An educated proletariat is not going 
 to be a contented or submissive proletariat. On 
 the contrary, the stirring of thought, the acqui- 
 sition of knowledge, the broadening of outlook — the 
 natural sequels of education — stir restlessness, an 
 ill-understood demand for expansion, a craving for 
 more elbow-room. Education liberates within men 
 a large imperious appetite for " more life and fuller." 
 And if the worker, in his newly-awakened sense of 
 larger possibilities of self-fulfilment, formulates 
 this demand in economic terms, of whom did he 
 learn the lesson ? Have not his masters bv their 
 
The DISINHERITED 31 
 
 own example been sedulously teaching him this 
 long time that a larger life is an affair of more things, 
 more money, more leisure, more creature comfort ? 
 The proletariat and the plutocracy are children of 
 the same age and naturally they use the same idiom ; 
 but the proletarian has learned to use it more con- 
 fidently because the plutocrat has used it so loudly 
 and so ostentatiously in his presence. 
 
 The consequences of the existing individualistic 
 organization of society need no recapitulation here ; 
 and they have formed the staple of benevolent 
 conversation for a long time. A great many truisms 
 have been said about the evils of competition ; and 
 the slum and its miseries have evoked an abundant 
 compassion. Sober Church courts have gone on 
 record again and again in the last few years that 
 the first charge upon the proceeds of an industry 
 is the just remuneration of those engaged in it. 
 But nothing is happening, save local and sporadic 
 attempts to alleviate the miseries of the poor and 
 to countervail the worst effects of the " system." 
 The pious opinions of ecclesiastical bodies and the 
 sympathetic commonplaces of the compassionate are 
 after all so much " blank practice " ; they do not 
 touch the evil heart of the business or bring the 
 practical remedy into the programme of the politician. 
 The new fact that we have to face to-day is that 
 the worker has made up his mind to smash the 
 system. If he is crying out for Socialism, it is less 
 to preach an economic theory than to oppose a new 
 ideal to an old tradition. He has gained at last a 
 sense of the measure of his power. He is no longer 
 disposed to go bargaining with the employer for this 
 
32 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 minor concession or that ; the cap-in-hand attitude 
 has become obsolete. The worker is getting ready 
 to lay the axe at the root of the tree — this " system," 
 the logic of which works out at once in the luxury 
 of the rich and the misery of the poor. 
 
 Robert Owen's doctrine of political indifferentism 
 would fall on deaf ears to-day. The awakened 
 working-class knows that the radical upheaval to- 
 ward which it is looking requires the capture of the 
 political machine. The legislatures of the world 
 are composed of the prosperous and well-to-do who 
 have a keener and more consistent scent for their 
 own class-interests than for the bodies and souls 
 of living men. The rights of property take pre- 
 cedence over the rights of humanity. The political 
 scales — as things are to-day — are heavily weighted 
 in favour of the privileged and propertied classes. 
 Beneath their public controversies, the traditional 
 political groups in every land are united in an unholy 
 alliance in defence of the status quo. Only the other 
 day the British Government proposed to grant a 
 royalty — a free gift — to landowners upon all the 
 petroleum which it was able to extract from their 
 estates ; and the fact that this piece of flagrant 
 class-legislation was defeated is itself a sign of the 
 changing attitude to property. The habitual out- 
 look of the conventional political mind was well 
 illustrated by the conversation of an American 
 public man in an interview not long ago. The talk 
 had turned on the man who worked with a pick for 
 a dollar and a half a day. 
 
 " Do you know why that man can't make more money ? 
 It's up here," and he pointed to his forehead. " It's the 
 
The DISINHERITED 33 
 
 shape of his brain. It's fatality. God Almighty did that, 
 and you can't change it. You're challenging Providence. 
 Distribute all the wealth in the country with absolute equality, 
 and what would happen within a year ? It would all be back 
 in the same hands." 
 
 ' Let's waive the question of grown-up men," I said, 
 " and take children. They at least ought to have equal 
 opportunity." 
 
 " Do you mean to tell me," said he, " that the child of the 
 poorest farmer or the poorest factory-hand in New England 
 hasn't just as good a chance to go to school and get an educa- 
 tion and become a bank director or railroad president as 
 J. P. Morgan ? " 
 
 ' I certainly do," I said. " Very few finish grammar 
 school. Take your Bureau of Labour statistics. Take the 
 report of your Public Health Service, which shows that less 
 than half of the adult male wage-earners in this country were 
 earning enough to support their families in decency and 
 comfort." 
 
 " It's their own fault," said he. " This is the freest and 
 finest country God ever made. Your quarrel is with God. 
 You have a perverted view of these things. If that's the 
 stuff you're preaching, I think you're probably doing more 
 harm than good." 
 
 " God never intended that a man should be allowed to 
 grow rich just from the ownership of land that others worked," 
 I suggested. 
 
 "As a landowner, you can't expect me to believe that," 
 he said. 
 
 Between the Kaiser and this gentleman, God 
 seems to have a good deal to answer for ; but the 
 tragedy of the situation is that a man in high admin- 
 istrative position should have no other answer to 
 the rising ferment of social revolt than this salad 
 of ancient platitudes. "As a landowner " — that is 
 [plainly the ground-plan of this man's theology, 
 his ultimate court of appeal respecting the divine 
 
 3 
 
34 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 government of the world, and, we may be sure, the 
 touchstone of his political conduct. For all this kind 
 of ineptitude there is preparing a rough arousal. 
 Before many years are gone, the affairs of state will 
 be — in most of the countries of Europe, at least — 
 in the hands of the man who has something wrong 
 with " the shape of his brain." 
 
 III. — The Goal of the New Insurgency 
 
 For it must be remembered that the sense of 
 disability and disinheritance has created in the 
 working-classes a new and profound sense of unity. 
 " Labour " is to-day a solidarity in a hitherto un- 
 known sense ; of recent years this solidarity has 
 become increasingly international, a process not 
 suppressed but only interrupted by the war. The 
 war has only served to aggravate the conditions out 
 of which this solidarity sprang in the first instance. 
 It is well known that, had not the war intervened, 
 England was about to find itself in the autumn of 
 19 14 in the grip of the fiercest industrial conflict in 
 its history. The struggle has been deferred only to 
 become more intense and more decisive. It is 
 possible that its venue may be changed from the 
 yards and the shops to the floor of the House of 
 Commons ; but the issue cannot be evaded. The 
 recent Report of the Commission on Labour Unrest 
 furnished instructive reading : " The unrest is real, 
 widespread, and in some directions extreme ; and 
 such as to constitute a national danger unless dealt 
 with promptly and effectively. We are at this 
 
The DISINHERITED 35 
 
 moment within view of a possible social upheaval 
 or at least extensive and manifold strikes." The 
 high prices of food, the exploits of the "profiteers," 
 the administration of the Military Service and the 
 Munitions Acts, the harsh treatment of conscientious 
 objectors, encroachments on the right of free speech, 
 over-fatigue, bad housing conditions in munition- 
 making areas — these are some of the aggravating 
 circumstances recorded by the Commissioners. 
 These things have combined to create so formidable 
 a unity of the British working-classes that it is 
 beyond any question that we are already face to 
 face with the controlling fact in the future of British 
 politics. And, existing as it does over against that 
 solidarity which is conveniently described as 
 " capital," this unity is shaping itself into a class- 
 consciousness which is as distinct and as definite 
 as the nation-consciousness, and which threatens — 
 for good or evil — to break it down and supersede it. 
 This class-consciousness, like the nation-conscious- 
 ness, has originated in the need of unity in self- 
 defence against predatory neighbours ; and in its 
 early stages its expression was largely confined to 
 the meaner and minor tactics of self-defence. The 
 " ca' canny " policy and other restrictions upon 
 output which were imposed by the Trade Unions were 
 no more than the experimental pin-pricks of insur- 
 gent juvenility. But that stage is long past ; we 
 are now in a period of large-scale strategy ; almost 
 certainly at the beginning of a planned and calcu- 
 lated offensive en masse. The outlook of " labour ' 
 is already many times broader than it was a decade 
 ago ; and its unity is more organic. It is gradually 
 
 
36 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 working a change in the character and quality of 
 its leadership. The old-time labour leader is be- 
 coming more and more of a survival ; the guerilla 
 chief is being superseded by the statesman. And 
 most notable of all is a perceptible change of temper. 
 While the class sense is more definite than ever, it 
 is less truculent and more good-humoured. This 
 may be born of a new confidence — the terms of the 
 conflict are more equal, and victory is nearer. But 
 it is chiefly the result of the new camaraderie, the 
 humanizing and broadening effect of a fellowship 
 constantly increasing in extent and in devotion to 
 a common purpose. 
 
 But to what goal is this mighty host moving ? 
 One thing may be said here with some confidence. 
 The objective is not socialism — that is, socialism of 
 the old orthodox Marxian type. Certainly in Eng- 
 land, Marxian Socialism has received its coup de 
 grace during the war. This may so far sound com- 
 forting to the rich and prosperous ; but the comfort 
 is not very substantial. The goal is not changed; 
 it is only the economic doctrine that is in process 
 of change. And that indeed is, as yet, far from 
 finally formulated. The extreme dogma of state- 
 ownership and state-control was a recoil from the 
 extravagances of nineteenth-century individualism ; 
 but the experience of English labour during the war, 
 where state-ownership and state-control have been 
 in wide operation, has supplied a necessary correc- 
 tive by revealing the inherent dangers of wholesale 
 centralization. What the economic formula will be 
 is, however, of less consequence than the spirit of 
 the movement. The early temper of suspicious 
 
 
The DISINHERITED 37 
 
 self-defence has been transformed into the generous 
 dream of a comparative commonwealth ; and what 
 has to be reckoned with is not a formula or a doctrine 
 but an idealism and a religion. Its gospel is a call 
 to the making of a new world in which the charmed 
 circle of opportunity shall be open, and the pre- 
 scriptive right of self-fulfilment shall be secured to 
 every man. The transition may turn out to be 
 very unpleasant to those who have been favoured 
 and fortunate hitherto ; for old usages cannot be 
 changed without hardship to those who have a 
 vested interest in them. But the new spirit is not 
 to be denied or stayed until another — and perhaps 
 the last — barricade which men have erected to keep 
 out their fellows from their native heritage of oppor- 
 tunity, that privilege which rests upon property, 
 shall have been abolished. 1 
 
 The strategy of the attack will vary according to 
 circumstances. In autocratic Russia, it took the 
 form of a coup d'etat, for there was no other way. 
 In democratic countries, it will move along consti- 
 tutional lines and endeavour to lay hold of the 
 machinery of government. But whether in this 
 way or in that, a revolution is at hand which is to 
 determine the course of the world for centuries to 
 come. The worker has come in sight of the promised 
 land, and by hook or by crook he is going to enter 
 in to possess it. 
 
 But what will he make of it when he has got it ? 
 
 1 Not property in itself, be it noted ; but the privilege 
 which property gives in the modern organization of society, 
 the supposed right of property to receive unearned profit 
 out of the labour of others. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 NEW CLOTHES OR A NEW BODY? 
 
 I. — The Melting-pot 
 
 IT is necessary that we should try at this point 
 to examine the social order which is threatened 
 with disruption. Perhaps it would be truer to 
 say that it is already in process of disruption ; 
 for amid the multitudinous uncertainty of these days 
 the one thing that is not at all uncertain is that 
 the pre-war social synthesis has already been broken 
 up beyond repair. The war is the end of an epoch. 
 It is not merely the state-system of Europe that is 
 tottering to its fall, but the habit of a generation. 
 The way of life, the mode of thought, the scale of 
 values of an age are gathered up and condemned 
 in one resounding and bloody judgment. It is 
 indeed very little of the old world that we shall 
 carry over into the new ; and it is better so. 
 
 But we shall require to re-examine — and probably 
 to throw overboard — a good many of our precon- 
 ceptions before our minds get into proper working 
 order for the business of shaping this new world 
 that is to be. For while we are all more or less 
 sedulously preparing our minds for great changes, 
 we are still thinking of them as coming within the 
 old framework. We are going to put new flesh on 
 the old skeleton ; and no doubt while we are in the 
 process of transition, some parts of the old skeleton 
 will be useful. But we must, all the same, be pre- 
 pared to realize that the implied programme of the 
 
 coming revolution is not that of building up new 
 
 38 
 
 
NEW CLOTHES or A NEW BODY? 39 
 
 flesh around the old skeleton, but of providing a 
 new skeleton as well. The traditional political and 
 economic acceptances are already in the melting-pot. 
 The British War Ministry has taken such liberties 
 with that ancient sanctity, " the British Consti- 
 tution," as to alter it almost beyond recognition ; 
 and this is likely to prove a fruitful precedent. The 
 " state ' before which the orthodox political philo- 
 sophers of Western Europe, Professor Bosanquet of 
 Oxford no less than Treitschke, had bidden us bow 
 in religious awe, is — thanks chiefly to the Germans 
 — coming out of the war a very bedraggled divinity. 
 Many hoary dogmas of statecraft have been put 
 under a moratorium by the exigencies of an urgent 
 military situation ; and some of them will probably 
 remain in their present obscurity for good. That 
 is so far an advantage ; there will be so much less 
 dead timber to be carted away. 
 
 But it is not enough. The truth of the matter is 
 that changes much deeper than changes in the charac- 
 ter and working of existing political institutions must 
 take place if those hopes, which we may reasonably 
 attach to the new rising life of the people, are to 
 be realized. Our political institutions and economic 
 " laws " are after all derivative things, character- 
 istic growths out of the soil of common life. " What 
 is radically vicious/' said Lamennais in 1825, " never 
 reforms itself. I do not speak here of the forms of 
 government, a question which absorbs men's minds 
 to-day, perhaps because it is the most fruitless. 
 Society is dying ; and they are disputing about the 
 clothes with which to cover it, so clear is it that 
 the disease is in its clothes." And with the same 
 
40 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 clear-eyed analysis, he writes a little later, "It is 
 necessary to lay in advance the foundations of a 
 new society ; the old is rotten ; it is dead and it 
 cannot be raised again. . . . Our work lies in the 
 creation of peoples." What Lamennais perceived 
 clearly was that the public evils of his time were 
 symptoms of a social disease that no political 
 revolution could remedy. The seat of the disorder 
 was in a region which political action could not 
 touch. And similarly in our day, economic re- 
 adjustments and political changes, however neces- 
 sary, are not of themselves likely to take us materially 
 nearer the co-operative commonwealth. The end 
 of capitalistic exploitation is not necessarily the 
 dawn of the millennium ; it may quite easily be the 
 beginning of a new kind of t}/ranny. Society needs 
 a new body before it needs new clothes. 
 
 II. — Civilization ? 
 
 An English periodical some time ago had a good 
 deal to say about " the spiritual treasures of a great 
 civilization " ; but unfortunately it did not pause 
 in the flow of its eloquence to tell us precisely what 
 these were. We were left guessing. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw tells us (and though his opinions are often 
 perverse, his facts have a habit of being most uncom- 
 fortably correct) that in England one person in five 
 dies in a poorhouse, or a public hospital, or a mad- 
 house ; we know that nine-tenths of the wealth 
 of the country goes into the pockets of one-tenth 
 of the population. " Since the war began." said 
 
NEW CLOTHES or A NEW BODY ? 41 
 
 a writer in the Quarterly Review (October 1917), 
 speaking of Great Britain, " there has been an 
 avoidable waste of the lives of a quarter of a million 
 children." " The killed," saj^s the London Observer, 
 commenting upon this statement, " are all babies 
 under the age of five and chiefly children of the 
 poorer classes. They die, as Lord Rhondda puts 
 it roundly, at the rate of about a thousand a week. 
 The principal causes are slums and over-crowding, 
 dirt and bad air, and the consequent diseases ; 
 shortage of competent midwifery and nursing ; sheer 
 ignorance on the part of young mothers whose school 
 training and chances afterwards had never fitted 
 them for intelligent maternity ; and last but not 
 least, insufficient nourishment with pure milk and 
 other right food. So they die." It is surely time 
 we had done with this sonorous cant about " the 
 spiritual treasures of a great civilization," — a civili- 
 zation which has no more sense than to go on com- 
 mitting suicide in this way by its incorrigible 
 ineptitude and ignorance, and what lies at last 
 beneath these things, its insatiable greed of wealth. 
 In point of fact we hear very little about the blessings 
 of civilization in the common talk of the east side 
 of New York or in a South Wales colliery village. 
 This kind of dithyrambic clatter is confined to the 
 comfortable classes. It is the folk who live sheltered 
 lives in conditions of ease and security far away 
 from the racket of the common world and academic 
 persons who think in abstractions in a seclusion 
 unruffled by the harsh brutalities of our social 
 system who become ecstatic about civilization. 
 Not the slum dweller, nor the average working-man, 
 
42 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 who is for the most part condemned to drab and 
 monotonous conditions of life from which the only 
 escape too often is the public-house, and to a dreary 
 routine of toil which often does not provide the 
 materials of a reasonable subsistence. The test of 
 a civilization does not consist in vague " spiritual 
 treasures/' but in the kind of men it makes, and 
 the kind of life it provides for them ; and the crime 
 of modern civilization is that it makes, as Ruskin 
 said long ago, everything but men. 
 
 This thing that we call civilization, what is it ? 
 Edward Carpenter regards it as a disease — in which 
 he is not altogether fair. Newman, on the other 
 hand — perhaps because he lived too early to see 
 clearly whither the logic of contemporary civili- 
 zation was leading — tells us that " aims, rules, 
 views, habits, projects, prudence, foresight, obser- 
 vation, inquiry, invention, resource, resolution, and 
 perseverance are its characteristics. Justice, bene- 
 volence, expedience, propriety, religion, are its 
 recognized, its motive principles. Supernatural 
 truth is its sovereign law." Carpenter and Newman 
 differ in their estimate of civilization because they 
 are looking at it from different sides. Civilization, 
 like every other human thing, is a wild tangle of 
 good and evil. 
 
 III.— The Scrap-heap and the Shambles 
 
 Civilization clearly begins with the civis, the 
 citizen, the dweller in the city. Folk who live in 
 cities have to master the art of living together. 
 
NEW CLOTHES or A NEW BODY ? 43 
 
 They learn that there are concessions which they 
 must needs make one to another in the interests 
 of a quiet life. Of course men lived together before 
 they lived in cities ; but the problems of living to- 
 gether became more acute and pressing in the more 
 concentrated society of the city. The processes 
 by which sharp corners were rubbed down and 
 idiosyncrasies moderated were correspondingly 
 accentuated. Gradually a set of recognized limi- 
 tations takes shape, and a kind of social order is 
 developed, a system of mutual accommodations in 
 self-defence. With this comes a certain refinement 
 of speech and bearing which contrasts sharply with 
 the uncouth habit of the rustic. The town dweller 
 has become civil or urbane (both of which words 
 mean simply townish). That seems to be the 
 beginning of civilization. 
 
 This process was of course all to the good. Men 
 must live together if they are to make the best of 
 themselves and of each other. And so long as 
 civilization was a spontaneous growth out of the 
 native human need of a social existence, it had the 
 promise of evolution. It w r as a living thing ; and 
 living things can grow. But civilization like many 
 another promising child grew T no better as it grew 
 bigger. This is not to say that civilization has not 
 preserved much of its original spontaneity ; and 
 in so far as it has done so, it is a treasure of untold 
 wealth. But a subtle change crept over it. It 
 ceased to be an organism and became an organi- 
 zation. The plant was transformed into a system. 
 The initial spontaneity of social conduct was super- 
 seded by the formality of legal obligation. Civili- 
 
44 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 zation as we know it in history rests upon an intricate 
 framework of checks and arrests and restraints, 
 formally and legally denned, and buttressed by a 
 scheme of pains and penalties, by which the human 
 animal is kept within bounds and by which the 
 human spirit is tied down to a hopeless mediocrity 
 of aspiration and achievement. This is the state 
 of things that the French writers of the eighteenth 
 century describe so aptly in the phrase " nations 
 policies" which is their substitute for " civilized 
 nations." 
 
 It may be that the development of the institution 
 of property had to do with this process of " police- 
 manizing " ; but property is not the only sanctity 
 which is imperilled by human waywardness. We 
 may well believe that something of this kind would 
 have happened even though human nature were 
 wholly innocent of inordinate acquisitiveness. In 
 any case, this framework appears to have become 
 and is still to be necessary. For without it we 
 should now fall apart into a wild anarchy in which 
 we should lose ourselves and one another. At all 
 costs we must hang together. Let us at the same 
 time harbour no illusions as to the kind of social 
 order which is secured in this way. It is at best 
 a precarious equilibrium resting upon a nice balance 
 of centrifugal and centripetal forces ; and how 
 unstable it is, the daily tale of lawlessness, recorded 
 in the Press, bears continual witness. Our self- 
 regarding instincts are essentially disruptive ; and 
 such social solidarity as we possess is secured by a 
 circuit of barbed-wire entanglements into which 
 human perversity travels at its peril. We are still 
 
NEW CLOTHES or A NEW BODY? 45 
 
 living in the jungle ; the ape and the tiger in us 
 are not dead or even dormant. Our outlook is 
 harshly competitive ; and the rule of life is still 
 the struggle for existence, with " the survival of the 
 fittest," where the fittest is all too often the clever 
 scoundrel. This is that " cosmic process " which 
 Huxley told us long ago we should have to reverse 
 if humanity is to make a real advance. But we 
 have not reversed it ; we have only limited it. That, 
 it is true, is no small advantage. We have certainly 
 improved the jungle in many ways ; but an improved 
 jungle is not the City of God. Civilization is still 
 only barbarism with a polished top. 
 
 The urbanity of the original town-dweller was 
 doubtless only skin-deep ; but it was at least a 
 voluntary thing, and for that reason it might have 
 sunk deeper and become a habit. But when the 
 element of constraint entered in, it turned the natural 
 man into a natural rebel. Consequently new checks 
 and new arrests upon the waywardness of human 
 impulse had to be devised ; and though this has 
 been going on a long time, a complete set has not 
 yet been formulated. The infinite variety and the 
 utter incalculability of human wilfulness can never 
 indeed be wholly provided for, however finely we 
 weave and however widely we spread the network 
 of law and order. But we do our best to overtake 
 the elusive task — with a fine hopefulness, still elect- 
 ing parliaments and legislatures to carry on this 
 unending labour of Sisyphus. And it has now come 
 to this — that civilization is a vast organization of 
 checks arrests and balances of self-interest, deriving 
 its sanctions chiefly from fear. Our common life 
 
46 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 is a scramble within the conditions imposed by the 
 huge accumulation of law and rule which we have 
 inherited from our fathers and to which each new 
 generation adds its contribution. The presupposition 
 of the first town dweller was that he might pursue 
 his own ends so long as he did not hurt his neigh- 
 bours. No doubt he did again and again hurt his 
 neighbours, but it was then an affair of personal 
 relationships, and it is not inconceivable that he 
 might at least have discovered that his neighbour 
 was, like himself, a good fellow. But the normal 
 postulate of the civilized man is that he is free to 
 pursue his own interests so long as he does not run 
 his head into the frontier posts of legal prohibition. 
 The early town dweller obeyed a rudimentary con- 
 science ; his modern descendant is restrained by a 
 compulsory code. The sanction has shifted from 
 within to without. The ordinary man starts out 
 with the assumption that he has a right, perhaps 
 even a duty, to grind his own axe and to seek his 
 own ends, so long as he keeps within the circle of 
 legal definitions, and that he may still claim to rank 
 as a good citizen. Let it be gladly conceded that 
 a strain of the original civis still survives in most 
 men ; and there are few men indeed who have not 
 a circle of friends and associates within which their 
 social conduct is voluntary and spontaneous. But 
 beyond their inner circle lies the human jungle 
 where the self-regarding instincts are still active, 
 curbed only by the menace of pain and penalty from 
 illicit predatory adventure. This is no basis for a 
 sound and fruitful social order. 
 And as it is within, so it is between communities. 
 
NEW CLOTHES or A NEW BODY? 47 
 
 Europe was held together before the war by a prin- 
 ciple called the Balance of Power, the opposition 
 to each other of two rival groups of self-interest 
 of approximately equal strength. Nations are 
 governed, like individuals, by self-interest ; inter- 
 national life is made up of the incessant interaction 
 of competing interests. Sometimes nations agree 
 to make certain mutual concessions, to regard cer- 
 tain modes of conduct as inadmissible between them, 
 to accept certain common checks and restraints 
 upon themselves in order to mitigate the severity 
 and the costly waste of the conflict of interests. 
 The growth of International Law is intrinsically no 
 more a proof of moral progress than it is a demon- 
 stration of the binomial theorem ; for even in the 
 jungle also, self-preservation is as much a matter of 
 mutual concession as of superior strength. The one 
 point at which some real advance in humanity 
 might have been claimed before the war, the Geneva 
 Convention, has been swamped by the new and 
 unthinkable horrors and brutalities of modern war- 
 | fare. The European state system rested upon a 
 delicate balance between the disruptive force of self- 
 interest and the cohesive energy of International 
 Law ; and how precarious the position was and how 
 little it took to bring it down in a howling ruin, 
 the origins of the present war sufficiently show. 
 This is still the jungle, the jungle on a large scale ; 
 a jungle, it is true, with the rudiments of public 
 law ; and a jungle with public law is a better place 
 to live in than a jungle without it. But it is at 
 the mercy of the ape and tiger all the time. When 
 they run amuck, public law goes for nothing. This 
 
48 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 is the inwardness of the happenings in Europe to- 
 day. Along with the human scrap-heap the most 
 notable achievement of civilization is the human 
 shambles. 
 
 It would be idle to deny that civilization has 
 wrought great and untold good to men. But it 
 has done so in so far as it has retained its character 
 as a free growth out of our native need for fellow- 
 ship. Wherever and whensoever it has preserved 
 or reasserted its freedom in the teeth of the 
 increasing complexity of coercive sanctions it has 
 been an inexhaustible treasure-house. The great 
 medieval churches of England were the products 
 of a free and vivid corporate life, as yet not strangled 
 by the heavy grip of centralized authority and 
 formal regulation. It is significant that the great 
 classics of literature have been either the achieve- 
 ments of periods of comparatively free and un- 
 hindered fellowship or the work of rebels like Dante, 
 Bunyan, Pascal, Blake, Krasinski, Shelley, and others 
 who defied the external bonds and sanctions by 
 which the society of their time was held together. 
 To-day genius is only able to express itself in the 
 teeth of civilization ; and next to the slum and the 
 shambles, its most damning feature is the hopeless 
 mediocrity of its artistic and creative achievement. 
 
 IV. — What will the New Order be ? 
 
 It is true that the wild beast has been penned 
 in a cage of his own making. His machinery of 
 law and order is the invention of his better or at 
 
NEW CLOTHES or A NEW BODY? 49 
 
 least of his saner self. But he has more and more 
 relegated the running of this machinery to a some- 
 thing outside himself which he calls the " state," 
 which is essentially only an apotheosis of the police- 
 man. But the " state " in practice has come to be to 
 all intents and purposes a small junta of privileged 
 persons ; and democracy has become in fact govern- 
 ment by a well-to-do- oligarchy. Of recent years 
 the " state " has heard the voice of organized labour 
 and social insurgency to some purpose ; but saving 
 only for the purpose of preserving national unity 
 in face of the disintegrating influences of war-time, 
 labour has not yet been allowed to sit in the seats 
 of the mighty. It has hitherto been confined to 
 the rather negative task of protest and criticism ; 
 it has now made up its mind to essay the positive 
 task of government. 
 
 But when it takes the task in hand, how will it 
 go about it ? Is it going to work on the basis of 
 the existing framework and only give us a new jungle 
 for the old ? Will it be merely that the top-dog 
 and the under-dog exchange places ? We see what 
 the ethical and psychological foundations of the 
 present confusion are ; and while they persist they 
 will work the same confusion at last even in spite of 
 the completest economic transformation. Is there 
 any guarantee that an extension of formal and ex- 
 ternal restraints upon predatory self-regard by drastic 
 dealings with property and its alleged rights will 
 produce a society materially better or happier ? 
 Frankly, are the moral and psychological conditions 
 of a co-operative commonwealth in sight ? It is good 
 that Labour should have achieved its present growing 
 
 4 
 
50 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 unity ; but it must be remembered that it is a unity 
 resting upon the need of a common front over 
 against a powerful enemy. When Labour is trium- 
 phant, is there any ground of expectation that it 
 will not m the hour of triumph fall apart like the 
 Balkan States after their war on Turkey, or like 
 the factions which were united to bring about the 
 Russian Revolution, but fell to quarrelling when 
 they began the business of reconstruction ? Has 
 the new spirit the moral reserves with which to 
 face the difficulties and to weather the vicissitudes 
 of the future ? Or to put it still more fundamentally, 
 can it (in Lamennais's fine phrase) " create peoples " ; 
 or is it only proposing to put new clothes on the old 
 rotten body? Will it give us a new kind of civili- 
 zation or is it going to be content with such changes 
 as may be wrought within the old framework ? 
 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE COEFFICIENT OF FREEDOM 
 
 I. — The Inwardness of Liberty 
 
 EDMUND BURKE once said that liberty 
 is what a people thinks it is. There are cer- 
 tain conditions which individuals and groups 
 regard as essential to the fulfilment of life, 
 and when they have these conditions, they consider 
 themselves free. Insomuch as they accept them 
 willingly, clearly no man can dispute their freedom. 
 That some one also denies that they are free does not 
 alter the fact that they are not aware of not being 
 free. Which means that liberty is an affair of the 
 mind, an inward, not an outward thing. Which in 
 its turn means that one's views of what constitutes 
 liberty depends at last upon what one conceives the 
 ends of life to be. 
 
 Britons have sung lustily for generations that 
 they never, never will be slaves. But when they 
 first sang that song, the one thing they resented 
 and feared was foreign domination ; and so they 
 fall to singing it with the same heartiness still if 
 some international trouble begins to brew. When- 
 ever it has appeared that the one thing that really 
 matters is to be and to remain a Briton, then liberty 
 clearly means keeping out the foreigner, even though 
 one is all the time in a quite real bondage to the 
 capitalist. If it be true that the chief end of a Briton 
 is to be a Briton, then the one problem of liberty is 
 to foil the Kaiser, even though in the process every 
 
 other domestic liberty is thrown to the winds. But 
 
 si 
 
52 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 while the Briton in his insular way has been apt to 
 think of the end of life as consisting chiefly in " being 
 British," the German has quite definitely believed 
 that his appointed end consisted in turning every 
 other man into a German. That is why he has 
 talked so much about his Kultur, so much indeed 
 that the whole world is sick of the word and the 
 thing. His real " place in the sun " was to spread — 
 anyhow — the glorious German way ; and whatever 
 personal self-limitation the great errand required, 
 he willingly accepted. He had all the elbow-room 
 he wanted for his job ; and it never entered into 
 his head that he was not a free man. 
 
 It is the amazing miracle of modern history that 
 a whole nation should have been subdued to the 
 docility which has characterized the German people 
 of this generation. But it shows how much can 
 be done — at least for a time — with human nature, 
 by proper drilling. The growth of the German idea 
 of a Kultur-mission need not detain us here. Its 
 natural history is that of any megalomania. But 
 whatever its origin, it has been the staple of German 
 education for more than a generation. This people 
 has persuaded itself that it is an elect race specially 
 chartered to tidy up and to finish this untidy and 
 unfinished world. This stimulating thought of a 
 world-wide national destiny was drilled into children 
 at school and into students at college. Teachers 
 and professors suspected of scepticism were removed. 
 Under this constant stimulus, the German people 
 have learnt to submit to an organization of them- 
 selves probably without even a distant historical 
 parallel. This has of course its admirable side. 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 53 
 
 Every nation is assuredly a chosen people — for some 
 good end ; and Germany had a good deal to teach 
 the world that the world needed to learn, such as 
 thoroughness, an infinite capacity for taking pains, 
 patience, willingness of subordination to the common 
 good. But the Germans made two bad mistakes. 
 They thought that they were the only people who 
 had anything of worth to give the world ; and they 
 could not think of any other way of giving it to 
 the world than by ramming it down the world's 
 throat. And the end of this was a social order 
 conceived as organization for power. Treitschke 
 talked of " a nation which was an army." 
 
 The proper criticism of this kind of thing is that 
 while it may make good Germans, it makes poor 
 men. And it is the growth of some vague and 
 ill-defined idea in the Anglo-Celtic peoples, that, 
 important as it might be to be good Britons or good 
 Americans, it was somehow more important to be 
 real men, that has made Great Britain and America 
 a soil so uncongenial to anything comparable to 
 German Kultur. It is true in a broad sense that 
 the Teutonic people have secured order at the ex- 
 pense of what the Anglo-Celtic and Latin peoples 
 call liberty ; and conversely. And the result of 
 this difference may be found in the contrast between 
 the trimness, the general tidiness, the uniformity of 
 modern German life, and the untidiness, the over- 
 lapping and the waste in social England and America. 
 But the German advantage here has been gained 
 at too great, too tragical a cost. Manhood has 
 been sacrificed to Germanhood, a very much smaller 
 thing. The German organization may have sup- 
 
54 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 pressed individualism ; but it has also gone far to 
 destroy individuality ; and if you want to keep 
 individuality alive, you must be ready to risk a 
 certain anarchy of individualism. An open space 
 even though it be somewhat untidy is a better and 
 a healthier place for men than a general trimness 
 in which it is impossible to turn round without 
 smashing the china. The passion for liberty is 
 a sort of space-hunger ; and its worst enemy is 
 regimentation. On sufficient cause, a people will 
 submit to regimentation without being sensible of 
 a real loss of liberty ; yet they cannot be regimen- 
 tated without a real and tragical loss of manhood. 
 For there is after all something in a man which 
 gives him an end in himself which is anterior and 
 not subordinate to his Germanism, his Britannicism, 
 or his Americanism. It is that thing that we some- 
 times call the soul, but which, by whatever name we 
 call it, is the distinction which makes him a man. 
 It is his selfhood ; and whatever place a man may 
 have to fill in the corporate movement of history, 
 whether of his nation or of the race, he cannot on 
 that account be deprived of his native and pre- 
 scriptive right to a full realization of his own person- 
 ality. This is why men are not for ever amenable 
 to regimentation. The soul cannot remain static ; 
 it is a living and therefore a growing thing. There 
 is in it a certain urge which chafes against conditions 
 that are felt to be cramping, and which in the end 
 either drives it to escape from those conditions or 
 to blow them up. This expresses itself in a demand 
 for elbow-room, for space, for the opportunity of 
 self-realization. The cramping conditions may be 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 55 
 
 of various kinds. They may be physical ; and this 
 elemental space-hunger will drive men afield seeking 
 the open, as it drove the Iberian and the Celt on 
 the great westward track before the dawn of history. 
 The conditions may affect the religious life ; and 
 the urge of life will drive men forth to seek a spiritual 
 emancipation, as it sent the Pilgrims to the unknown 
 shores of New England. The cramping circumstances 
 may be of the political kind, in which case they may 
 be smashed up as in the French Revolution. The 
 Russian Revolution is essentially an attempt to 
 abolish economic conditions that bind men's souls. 
 All this is the native and intrinsic energy of life, 
 the elan vitale, as Bergson calls it, the urge of life 
 in its everlasting fight against the crippling and 
 impoverishing limitations of matter and of a material- 
 istic world-order. 
 
 II. — Authority the Denial of Liberty 
 
 This then is the central problem of social order — 
 how to respect man's clear right to achieve indi- 
 viduality without leaving the door open to the 
 disruptive waywardness of mere individualism ; 
 and it is a problem which still awaits solution. 
 Historically, order has been chiefly secured by a 
 process which destroys both individualism and indi- 
 viduality at the same time, the attempt to coerce 
 men by external pressure into some kind of solidarity. 
 That has been the traditional policy of the govern- 
 mental type of mind, whether one finds it in the 
 autocrat or the bureaucrat, in the state or in the 
 
56 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 church. Their ideal is that of a regiment at ed 
 society based upon the conscription of wills ; their 
 only formula for a social basis is uniform submission 
 to authority. They aim at unity by establishing 
 uniformity, on the assumption that the infinite 
 variety of human nature can be drilled to a common 
 submission and reduced to a single type by heavy 
 pressure from the outside. But human nature can 
 stand just so much of this kind of treatment ; and 
 when the process goes beyond a certain point, it 
 provokes insurgency and invites its own destruction. 
 Life is stronger than any chains of man's forging ; 
 and no form of coercion has yet been devised which 
 can bind the soul for ever. The great failure of 
 history is authoritarianism. 
 
 Liberty, however is not a principle which can 
 stand alone. It is exposed to two dangers — abuse 
 and neglect. The people who lose their liberty 
 are those who use it wrongly and those who do 
 not use it at all. From these dangers it can only 
 be saved by a co-ordinate principle which will con- 
 tinually vitalize it and balance it That companion 
 principle, what is it ? 
 
 The orthodox answer is, of course, Authority ; 
 and so long as we keep to abstractions the answer 
 is sound. But the word Authority is by now 
 definitely polarized. It is used exclusively — in this 
 connection — to describe an authority which is ex- 
 ternal, and therefore uniform, more or less 
 mechanical and centralized. But this kind of 
 authority is the negation and not the coefficient 
 of liberty. It has already been pointed out that 
 historically the will to freedom has had to assert 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 57 
 
 itself continually against constituted authority. And 
 if it be said that this has been provoked by the 
 aggression of an overgrown authority, an authority 
 become tyrannous, the answer is that authority 
 tends from its very nature to gravitate into tyranny. 
 Authority demands for its own self-realization unity 
 and centralization ; and where authority is external, 
 the only chance for liberty lies in dividing the 
 authority against itself and in keeping it divided. 
 
 But there is another deeper and more subtle 
 reason why authority is the enemy of liberty, even 
 authority which is not grown tyrannous. It un- 
 doubtedly leads to the atrophy of that human 
 instinct which is the real coefficient of freedom. 
 Psychologists have observed the fact that in the 
 course of nature the acquisitiveness of the child is 
 by and by checked and corrected by a nascent 
 sense of justice ; its infantile individualism is balanced 
 by a crude but promising social sense. But when 
 the child grows up, it finds itself in a world of law 
 where a scheme of prohibitions and requirements 
 appears to define the areas of social obligation. 
 Its inherited social conscience is largely superseded 
 by a conventional practice sanctioned and enforced 
 I by an external authority. Law-abidingness becomes 
 I the norm and the limit of social obligation ; and 
 whatsoever lies beyond (save in the intimate rela- 
 tion of friendship and kinship) is a work of super- 
 erogation. The arrested development of the social 
 conscience of mankind is largely chargeable to the 
 authoritarian heresy. For it has substituted legal 
 definitions for the instances of the social conscience 
 and has so far stifled its growth. For its virtual 
 
58 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 effect is this: that having described the circle of 
 legal liability, it is taken as saying, " You may be 
 as much of a wild beast as you can and want to be, 
 so long as you keep within this hedge." The actual 
 result is that the circle has to be continually revised ; 
 the ramification of the law becomes ever finer and 
 more extensive, yet never fine or extensive enough 
 to cover the craft and the daring of a liberty demor- 
 alized and perverted by the atrophy of its natural 
 coefficient. Hence always, in corruptisima civitate, 
 plurimcB leges. 
 
 It is true that law is in the first instance a product 
 of the social conscience. But because it is an attempt 
 to define social obligation, it comes in time to be 
 regarded as stating the sum of social obligation. 
 Naturally, therefore, it tends to check the free 
 operation and the expansion of the social conscience ; 
 and at last even puts an embargo upon original 
 goodness. That is why the moral pioneer and the 
 prophet have usually been treated as criminals. 
 In the eyes of authority, to transcend the law is 
 as grave an offence as to transgress it. This is the 
 position to which Jesus addresses himself in the 
 Sermon on the Mount. " Except your righteous- 
 ness exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye 
 shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." 
 The conventional moral practice was good enough 
 so far as it went ; but it was an affair of definitions 
 and injunctions. It repressed and confined the free 
 working of that moral consciousness of which it 
 was at best only a provisional and elementary ex- 
 pression. Sweep away these limits, said Jesus. 
 The moral sentiment which forbids murder ought 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 59 
 
 not to be stopped at that point. Its vital logic 
 should go on to arrest the anger which leads to 
 murder, and to prevent the offence which provokes 
 the anger. But in point of fact it does not do so. 
 The law which was intended to restrain the evil 
 doer ends in paralysing the chief natural safeguard 
 against evil doing. The spirit of the law within 
 is put out of effective action by the letter of the 
 law without. The office of the social conscience 
 becomes a sinecure. Its capacity for expansion and 
 growth is destroyed ; and it is content to operate 
 in a mechanical, stereotyped fashion within the 
 prescribed limits. Its reactions to moral evil are 
 conventional and formal ; and its moral ideal is 
 reduced to a standardized goodness without inde- 
 pendence or originality. 
 
 This is not to say that there are not certain con- 
 ditions in which discipline and tutelage are essential ; 
 and it is possible that the recoil from authority in 
 certain modern educational theories is injuriously 
 exaggerated. But it will inflict no injury commen- 
 surate to that which has come from the process by 
 which authority has deprived the common man of 
 the responsibility of independent moral judgment 
 and the capacity of original and spontaneous moral 
 action. One of the urgent needs of our time is a 
 large restriction of the area of authority, if only 
 to throw normal human nature back upon its own 
 resources and to liberate the suspended and inert 
 faculty of moral criticism and adventure. This is 
 indeed by no means all that is needed ; but that 
 this is a real need is not open to question. Further 
 multiplication of the machinery of social control 
 
60 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 would be disastrous — even though it be devised 
 in the interests of social emancipation. I have had 
 occasion to observe some of the effects of the re- 
 formatory school system on children. When boys 
 and girls who have been subjected to the rigorous 
 discipline of these institutions have been subse- 
 quently placed in conditions of comparative free- 
 dom, they appear at first inert and lethargic. But 
 when they realize the absence of the old restrictions, 
 their energy begins to discharge itself, and continues 
 to do so with increasing violence and swiftness, 
 until it sometimes carries them to excesses of mis- 
 behaviour greater than those of their original way- 
 wardness. But when this period of reaction has 
 worked itself out, there is almost invariably an 
 awakening of the sense of obligation to others- 
 very dim and flickering, it is true, and frequently 
 manifesting itself in ways incredibly grotesque— 
 but nevertheless a very real thing which only needs 
 a real opportunity in order to become a very power- 
 ful force of regeneration. And this has led, again 
 and again, in communities where the juvenile delin- 
 quent is treated on these lines, to a spontaneous 
 attempt to establish some sort of domestic social 
 order. The appointed coefficient of freedom is 
 already within us. It only awaits release. This 
 release requires something more than a contraction 
 of the sphere of authority ; but at least it does require 
 that. 
 
 III. — The Will to Fellowship 
 
 Alongside of the will to self-fulfilment, which is 
 the mainspring of the demand for liberty, is the 
 
{ The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 61 
 
 instinct for fellowship. Just as men were made to 
 be free, so they were made to be social. Mr. Chester- 
 ton says in one of his books that Hanwell is full of 
 people who believe in themselves, by which he means 
 that isolation brings insanity. Whether it be the 
 isolation of self-contempt or of self-conceit, the end 
 is always the same — idiocy. Kipling has somewhere 
 a terrible story of two men on a lonely lightship, 
 of whom one dies ; and the rest of the story describes 
 the mental breakdown of the survivor. Society is 
 necessary for sanity, and no less for sanctity. Even 
 holiness is a social product. The hermit and the 
 anchorite who sought solitude in order to escape 
 defilement went to the wrong place to achieve saint- 
 liness. Jesus came not merely to save men, but 
 to create a society ; for souls are only fully saved 
 when they are being saved together. We cannot 
 do without one another, for we are members one 
 of another. If personality must have space, it 
 must no less have society. " Religion," said George 
 Meredith, " was born in fellowship." The discovery 
 of God was made by a company ; and you will find 
 that all the great abiding human achievements are 
 social acts or products. Schools of the prophets in 
 Israel, schools of philosophers in Greece, schools of 
 mystics in the Middle Ages, schools of artists in the 
 Renaissance — these are the central fires out of which 
 are shot forth living things, things of everlasting 
 life — the Hebrew prophecies, Plato's Republic, the 
 Imitation of Christ, the sculptures of Michelangelo, 
 the pictures of Titian, and much more. And when 
 Lamennais said that the proper corollary of the 
 achievement of liberty was the creation of peoples, 
 
 V 
 
62 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 he meant this one thing — that liberty could only 
 be saved by being socialized, just as society could 
 not be regenerated without being liberated. Here 
 is the natural coefficient of freedom — fellowship. 
 
 But it is not enough to say the word. As one does 
 not drift into freedom, so no one lapses into fellow- 
 ship. Like freedom, fellowship comes to nothing 
 unless it be a passion. There is a shallow camaraderie 
 which costs nothing, gives nothing, and demands 
 nothing but the small change of a convivial hour. 
 But all vital fellowship requires an active and patient 
 will to fellowship ; it only lives as an eager co-oper- 
 ation. We can only create it as we make a business 
 of it. The materials and energies of fellowship are 
 stored up in us ; but they have to be set moving 
 with seriousness and system before we get the thing 
 itself. 
 
 At last, morality is essentially the art of fellowship, 
 and ethics the science of social relationships. In 
 practice, the distinction between individual and 
 social ethics is quite unreal ; for no man can live 
 unto himself alone. St. Paul's case for truthfulness 
 is the case for every moral act and attitude — " we 
 are members of one another." When Professor 
 Rauschenbush defines love as " no flickering or way- 
 ward emotion, but the energy of a steadfast will 
 bent on creating fellowship," he is declaring the 
 law and the gospel. There is little more urgent in 
 the interests of sound thinking and clear speech 
 than some rehabilitation of this word love, its rescue 
 from the slough of saccharine sentimentalism and 
 its recognition as the generic name of those human 
 impulses which constitute the many-coloured energy 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 63 
 
 of social cohesion. We sometimes speak of justice 
 and love as though they were in some sort antithetical, 
 or at least the expressions of different and separate 
 moral principles. What we ordinarily call justice 
 is at best nothing more than the rough and crude 
 readjustment of conflicting claims or the redress 
 of an injury, usually effected by some kind of com- 
 pulsion. It does not establish a right relation be- 
 tween the opposing parties ; it fails to touch the 
 moral problem which is involved in all injustice. 
 If real justice is respect and care for my neighbour's 
 rights, then it must spring from within, and can 
 never be imposed from without. At the best, justice 
 as it is commonly conceived is but a method of out- 
 ward equilibration — as things are, a necessary ex- 
 pedient to prevent social anarchy. That its origins 
 are to be found in the social conscience is beyond 
 doubt, but its actual practice represents no positive 
 principle of social integration. It does no more 
 than tighten the joints of the cage in which the 
 ape and tiger are penned. A radical justice — which 
 consists of a thoroughgoing respect for my neigh- 
 bour's rights — depends upon an attitude to my 
 neighbour which comes under the category of Love. 
 And from this source come all the varied impulses 
 of social integration — restitution and forgiveness, 
 forbearance and toleration, sympathy and mutual 
 help, and the rest. These, and such as these, are 
 the moral foundations of the co-operative common- 
 wealth, the ingredients of living fellowship. 
 
64 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 IV. — Democracy, its Failure and the Remedy 
 
 In all the current speculations about reconstruction, 
 a great deal of attention is paid to forms of govern- 
 ment. There are those who hope for salvation from 
 the overthrow of monarchies ; and we have been 
 told again and again that the world can never find 
 rest until Germany is democratized. This war is 
 being fought " to make the world safe for democracy." 
 But it is not at all certain that either democracy 
 or a republican form of government guarantee the 
 necessary conditions either of freedom or of fellow- 
 ship. That Jack's vote is as good as his master's 
 does not of itself secure the right kind of relation 
 between Jack and his master. Political equality does 
 not do away with the possibility either of the worst 
 kind of exploitation, or of cruel oppression. Lincoln's 
 famous formula, " Government of the people by the 
 people for the people," has in practice too often 
 been converted — even in the very name of democ- 
 racy — into government of the people by a bourgeois 
 oligarchy in the interests of the privileged classes. 
 And it does not in the least follow that government 
 by majorities safeguards those essential spiritual 
 principles by which men live. When so much 
 eloquence is being poured forth in praise of democ- 
 racy, it might not be amiss to recall Lord Acton's 
 warning : " Democracy no less than monarchy or 
 aristocracy sacrifices everything to maintain itself, 
 and strives with an energy and a plausibility that 
 kings and nobles cannot attain, to override repre- 
 sentation, to annul all the forces of resistance and 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 65 
 
 deviation, and to secure, by plebiscite, referendum 
 or caucus, free play for the will of the majority. 
 The true democratic principle, that none shall have 
 power over the people, is taken to mean that none 
 shall be able to restrain or to evade its power ; the 
 true democratic principle that the people shall not 
 be made to do what it does not like is taken to mean 
 that it shall not be required to tolerate what it does 
 not like. The true democratic principle that every 
 man's free will shall be as unfettered as possible is 
 taken to mean that the free will of the people shall 
 be fettered in nothing. Religious toleration, 
 judicial independence, dread of centralization, 
 jealousy of state interference, become obstacles to 
 freedom instead of safeguards when the centralized 
 force of the state is to be wielded by the hands 
 of the people. Democracy claims to be not only 
 supreme, without authority above, but absolute, 
 without independence below ; to be its own master 
 and not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the w r orld 
 are exchanged for a new one, w-ho may be flattered 
 and deceived, but whom it is impossible to resist 
 or to corrupt, and to whom must be rendered the 
 things that are Caesar's and also the things that are 
 God's. Ideally, it is true, democracy is the only 
 possible way of life for awakened men ; but in prac- 
 tice, as we have known it, it has only served to keep 
 the ring clear for the strong man. Political equality 
 has been stultified by its permission of a freedom 
 which has led to the extremest form of economic 
 inequality. It has made possible a new type of 
 privilege — the privilege based on property, and a 
 new kind of exploitation — the exploitation of men 
 
66 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 by money. This does not necessarily mean that 
 democracy has proved a failure ; but only that it 
 has been incomplete. But we have no guarantee 
 that economic equality will make it any the more 
 complete. Social democracy may quite easily in 
 time create a new type of privilege. It may be 
 maintained with a good deal of assurance that the 
 extremes cf luxury and misery have been much 
 greater during the age of democracy than in any 
 previous period. Certainly the rich have never 
 been richer or the poor poorer than in our day. Yet 
 of itself the limitation or the abolition of the oppor- 
 tunity of economic exploitation does not contain 
 an}f guarantee that the millennium will immediately 
 follow. The devil that is cast out may quite easily 
 — as he has often done — return to the empty and 
 garnished house with seven devils worse than him- 
 self. Political democracy is a necessary but in- 
 adequate organ of life ; add to it the policy of eco- 
 nomic equality, and it will still be inadequate. The 
 only thing that can make democracy safe for men 
 is a thoroughgoing moralization. And those who 
 imagine that the abolition of the property privilege 
 will liberate moral forces adequate to the sound 
 reconstruction of society are living in just the same 
 kind of fool's paradise as those simple people who 
 think that the defeat of the Central Powers will 
 immediately release a stream of moral power suffi- 
 cient of itself to create a new world. If democracy 
 is to be moralized, it must be moralized from within. 
 Its principle of equality must be supplemented 
 by its own natural co-ordinate — the principle of 
 fraternity. 
 
The COEFFICIENT of FREEDOM 67 
 
 And there is in the time before us a quite real 
 danger that the new resurgent elements in society 
 may fall in love with government as deeply as any 
 previous ascendant class has done. It is not incon- 
 ceivable that we may see the state growing into a 
 Leviathan more monstrous than Hobbes's ; and 
 instead of aristocracy and a bourgeois plutocracy we 
 may find ourselves under the heels of a bureaucracy. 
 With whatever sympathy one observes the insur- 
 gency of the proletariat, it is useless to hide from 
 oneself the possibilities of self-frustration that are 
 inherent in the movement. It has been observed 
 with justice that nationality is a good thing so long 
 as it is being striven for, but that once obtained it 
 becomes a peril. It may grow into imperialism. 
 And a social democracy, however desirable and 
 necessary it may be, may — with a centralized state — 
 quite conceivably become a first-class tyranny. 
 Between Prussian junkers and proletarian bureau- 
 crats there is not a pin to choose. For the religion 
 of both alike is uniformitarianism ; and uniformi- 
 tarianism is death. 
 
 A popular rising is always a moving spectacle ; 
 and it has its origins in real causes. But its triumph 
 may become a tragedy ; and indeed will always end 
 in tragedy if its insurgency is not charged with 
 moral passion. A revolt against injustice and dis- 
 ability may easily create hew injustice and new 
 disability unless the spirit of the revolt is itself the 
 spirit of justice. Resentment may raise a rebellion, 
 but it cannot establish a revolution. It will do 
 no more than change the clothes of the old body. 
 The real menace in the present insurgency has been 
 
68 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 and is, its emphasis upon class-interests. This is 
 indeed not unnatural. But so long as the class 
 motive governs the movement, it will hardly accom- 
 plish more than the creation of new class-frontiers 
 which may in their turn become as burdensome 
 and reactionary as the old. The new British Labour 
 Party has rightly included in its membership workers 
 by brain as well as by hand ; and this growing 
 catholicity is certainly a sign of great hope. Implied 
 in it is the demand that all those who board and 
 lodge on the industry of a country shall take some 
 active share in it, or in the enrichment of the country's 
 life. This is as it should be. The day of the " idle 
 rich " is over. But having achieved this end, a 
 nation which shall be a working people, can we save 
 it from schism and disintegration ? From difference 
 of opinion, of course, it cannot be saved ; and it 
 would be a bad day for it when it sought such a 
 salvation. But from divisions that became antago- 
 nisms, from partisanships that became tyrannies, 
 from competition that becomes exploitation, no 
 society can be saved except it be informed by a 
 genuine moral passion, a deep humanism which has 
 ceased to think in terms of class or party or any 
 other sectional interest. Such a society may seem 
 a chimera at the present time ; yet there seems to 
 be no reason why men should not become possessed 
 by the passion for fellowship, as in times past they 
 have been possessed by the passion for freedom. 
 And this is the moral impulse which will make in 
 the coming days the difference between a social 
 revolution which is a dance of death and one that 
 shall be a pageant of life. For the old single slogan 
 
The COEFFICENT of FREEDOM 6q 
 
 of Freedom we must adopt the double slogan of 
 Freedom and Fellowship. We have before us larger 
 tasks than the redemption of a class. Our business 
 is to create a living society. And we must set out 
 in the faith that it can be done. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 CHANGE OF HEART 
 
 I. — Revolution and Religion 
 
 HAT was most peculiar and essential 
 in his creed," says Professor Dowden of 
 Lamennais, "remained the same through 
 every change — the opinion that all real 
 society, all society which contains a principle of 
 stability, must be founded upon a religious faith. 
 To spiritualize the democracy was to the last the 
 object of his most earnest endeavours. ..." Lamen- 
 nais's great contemporary Mazzini believed with a 
 like intensity of conviction that the future was 
 bound up with a revival of faith. The former in- 
 scribed upon the programme of his famous news- 
 paper L'Avenir the motto, "For God and Liberty"; 
 and Mazzini's battle-cry was like unto it, " For God 
 and Humanity." 
 
 Lamennais abandoned his Church because he 
 found that it (no less than the monarchies of Europe) 
 was more intent upon the preservation of its prestige 
 and its privileges than upon its mission in the world. 
 It was, he believed, vain to look to it to take any 
 share in " the creation of peoples," in spiritualizing 
 the democracy ; and it should be acknowledged 
 with frankness that the lapse of a century has not 
 availed to quicken any livelier promise of a Church 
 eager and competent to establish society upon a 
 spiritual basis. It is useless to evade the palpable 
 fact that the present insurgency of the proletariat 
 acknowledges no debt to or affinity with the insti- 
 
 10 
 
CHANGE of HEART 71 
 
 tutional religion of our time. Not that the new 
 movement is not religious ; it is in a very real way 
 a religion to many who have found in it a hope that 
 the Churches have not brought to them and a living 
 faith which is in vivid contrast to the conventional 
 religious gestures of our Christian bourgeoisie. The 
 normal attitude of the social insurgent to the Church 
 is indifference, contempt or active antipathy ; and 
 his judgment upon it is that it is an obsolete survival, 
 hardly worth an old-age pension. 
 
 But it does not in the least follow — and in point 
 of fact it is exceedingly unlikely — that the religious 
 impulse in the revolutionary movement is anything 
 like sufficient for its aims or powerful to exercise 
 the moral discipline necessary to the accomplishment 
 of the task in hand. Some years ago Dr. Forsyth 
 asked the question — addressing it in the first instance 
 to the advocates of what is called the " social Gospel ' 
 — " What is our social ardour to live on after a few 
 disillusionizing generations ? What moral reserves 
 are we storing up for the vicissitudes of the great 
 business of history ? " Our answer may not agree 
 with Dr. Forsyth's, but the question is well put and 
 pertinent — more widely pertinent to-day than when 
 he put it. It is our conviction that the new rising 
 life of the people requires for its fulfilment a larger 
 spiritual content and a more severe and steady 
 moral discipline than as yet it appears to contain, 
 and the crisis of the Church is the question whether 
 it is going to measure up to this great and pressing 
 task of spiritualizing and moralizing the nascent 
 social democracy. 
 
 It is not without misgiving that one confesses 
 
72 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 the almost total absence of any present likelihood 
 
 that the Church will be found ready against that 
 
 day. It is idle and cheap work to rail against the 
 
 Church ; but a churchman may be permitted to 
 
 ask other churchmen to face the facts, however 
 
 unpleasant they may be. Here a great fuss about 
 
 the Second Advent ; and there much ado about 
 
 Christian unity ; and everywhere the Church a sort 
 
 of general utility agency, a maid-of-all-work in the 
 
 community, doing all sorts of little odd jobs that 
 
 do not belong to it ; meantime its life petering out 
 
 in bustle and talk. We go to Free Church Council 
 
 meetings and to " Congresses on Christian Efficiency, " 
 
 and we draw out pretty paper plans of co-operative 
 
 evangelism and what not ; and all the time the 
 
 churches becoming emptier, and the Bride of Christ 
 
 despised and rejected of men. There is no sadder 
 
 chapter in the Church's history than its chronic 
 
 unpreparedness for emergencies. The great crises 
 
 in human affairs have taken it unawares. When 
 
 the crisis of July 1914 came upon the world, the 
 
 Church was stricken dumb before it. Yet had it 
 
 been about its business, it might even at the eleventh 
 
 hour have stood above the storm, as its Master did 
 
 one day on Gennesaret, and have said to the winds 
 
 and waves of human passion, " Peace, be still." 
 
 But the word was not on its lips. And it has done 
 
 little since save trim its flagging sails to catch any 
 
 breeze of militant patriotism that may be abroad — 
 
 and seemingly without much fruitful result. It 
 
 talks a great deal about being ready " for the boys 
 
 when they come back." But will it be ready to 
 
 answer the questions which some of these " boys," 
 
CHANGE of HEART 73 
 
 when they return, are preparing to ask ? And will 
 it be ready in the day when these boys, who have 
 fought the Prussian, begin to settle accounts with 
 the plutocrat ; will it be ready to say the redeeming 
 word — not the assuaging word, not the emollient 
 word, but the word that will release the moral passion 
 which must possess the people if the approaching 
 upheaval is to be not a spasm of iconoclastic fury, 
 but a revival of life ? It will not be enough to take 
 a belated hand in trying to compose the bitter antago- 
 nisms that may develop ; nothing is enough save 
 the endeavour to provide a stable moral basis for 
 a new society. That the Church is awake to this 
 urgency there appears little sign. If it is not fiddling 
 while Rome is burning, it is for the simple reason 
 that it does not yet seem to be aware that Rome 
 is on fire. 
 
 II. — The Moral Tragedy of the World 
 
 In a letter received by the present writer some 
 years ago from Rudolf Eucken, the philosopher 
 said, " If Christianity is to overcome the world, 
 it must on the one hand return to its own living roots, 
 and on the other be applied to the problems of the 
 present time in ever- widening circles." That the 
 catholic implications of Eucken's philosophy did 
 not save him from surrendering to the nationalistic 
 frenzies of war-time is one of the minor tragedies 
 of these troubled vears ; that however does not 
 affect the general soundness of this saying. " To 
 return to its own living roots/' trulv ; and to recover 
 
74 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 the primal word of its commission, this is the immedi- 
 ate wisdom of the Church. And to begin at the 
 beginning means that it realizes afresh that its 
 permanent and radical problem is the moral tragedy 
 of the world. 
 
 It would be difficult to discover a better example 
 of the foolish things that wise men can say when 
 they wander from their beats than Sir Oliver Lodge's 
 statement : " The higher man of to-day is not worry- 
 ing about his sins at all, still less about their punish- 
 ment ; his mission, if he is good for anything, is to 
 be up and doing." This was, of course, before the 
 war. In those days the general tendency was to 
 minimize sin and to explain it away, but it is surely 
 no longer possible, in full view of this cataclysm 
 of fire and blood, to dismiss so cavalierly from our 
 reckonings what Lord Morley, with a surer judgment, 
 has described as " that horrid burden and impedi- 
 ment upon the soul which the Churches call sin, 
 and which by whatever name you call it is a real 
 catastrophe in the moral nature of man." 
 
 The reduced view of sin which prevailed before 
 the war is to be accounted for partly by our modern 
 obsession with the idea of Progress. This idea in 
 its current form is a direct derivative from the 
 evolution dogma. After the first sharp shock of 
 resentment upon the publication of the Darwinian 
 hypothesis, we incontinently surrendered to it and 
 began to apply it in every direction. In particular 
 we introduced it into the study of history and ethics, 
 and in doing so failed to allow adequately for the 
 fact of human freedom. We surrendered to the 
 conception of human perfectibility without remem- 
 
 
CHANGE of HEART 75 
 
 bering the evidence of human perversity which is 
 to be found both in history and personal experience. 
 We began to conceive of a universe fated to progress. 
 We formed a mental picture of a world which was 
 solemnly and steadily rolling up a gently inclined 
 plane to the city of God. Plainly in this view of 
 the world the New Testament doctrine of sin would 
 fare badly ; our moral defeats and failures were 
 obviously only untoward little incidents of the great 
 cosmic ascent. Our moral imperfection and per- 
 versity appeared to be no more than an infantile 
 disease which the forces of progress aided by a genial 
 Christian culture would enable us to outgrow. And 
 because the Christian thinker felt the pressure of 
 the new scientific view of the world, the conversion- 
 Gospel of the New Testament became obscured by 
 a culture-Gospel, a gospel eviscerated as tragically 
 as the play of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark 
 left out, a Gospel devoid of a forthright ethical 
 realism. 
 
 There were also other causes contributing to this 
 reduced view of sin — such as the habit of thinking 
 of God in an impersonal way (which was a by- 
 product of the scientific tendency to reduce every- 
 thing to terms of energy) ; and a disproportionate 
 conception of the relation of man to the universe 
 (arising out of an exaggerated evaluation of mere 
 size). But the main stream was undoubtedly our 
 indiscriminating capitulation to this view of 
 predestined progress. Yet it may be questioned 
 whether the obsession would have become so deep 
 and so general had we not been living in a period 
 of extraordinary material prosperity. Life was 
 
76 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 exceedingly easy and smooth, taking it as a whole, 
 in the last generation. Distant echoes from Putu- 
 mayo, an occasional strike, a small war — these 
 things and such as these hardly dented the surface 
 of our complacency. The evenness and comfort of 
 the ordinary man's life made him dull and insensitive 
 to the moral tragedy of the world. On the whole, 
 things were going on very well indeed. The old 
 chariot of progress was forging its way bravely up 
 the hill ; and presently we should arrive. Just 
 where we were going to arrive did not seem very 
 clear. That however did not matter. Wherever it 
 was, we were getting there. 
 
 And now the chariot has been suddenly and 
 awfully pitched over a precipice ; and we are writh- 
 ing at its foot in blood and tears. We had said 
 complacently that the " ape and tiger ' were at 
 the point of death ; behold, they have turned upon 
 us and are rending us in pieces. The moral tragedy 
 of the world is being enacted in a muddy, bloody 
 horror before our eyes ; and our little fantastic 
 dreams of progress are looking very futile and cheap 
 over against this vast catastrophe. This war is 
 the greatest revelation of the moral perversity of 
 man since Calvary. It is idle, if we want to grasp 
 this situation with any degree of ethical realism, 
 to attempt to reach a moral judgment upon it by 
 a measurement of comparative culpabilities. Before 
 God, the world of man is a solidarity and mankind 
 a moral unity ; and the theologian has the duty 
 of discovering beneath the concrete happenings of 
 the time that universal disorder of which they 
 are the results and symptoms, and which has en- 
 
CHANGE of HEART yy 
 
 gulfed the whole world in this tragedy of blood and 
 tears. The one thing we cannot do after this is to 
 belittle sin or explain it away. 
 
 The war is declaring in terms that cannot be 
 mistaken that whatsoever a man sows that shall 
 he also reap. It is vindicating what has seemed 
 to many a mere pulpit hyperbole — that there is 
 in the world, for the single soul and for communities, 
 a single moral order which is the ground-plan of 
 the universe, and that transgression of this moral 
 order infallibly leads to retribution, and is the root 
 of the moral tragedy of the world. It is only when 
 we see, as we see to-day, the certainty and the scale 
 of the harvest which transgression of the moral 
 order must soon or late reap, that we realize how 
 stark, how implacable, how uncompromising a thing 
 it is. Historical instances without number might 
 be cited to show how inevitably nations and men 
 who have sown the wind reap the whirlwind. And 
 when one recalls the shameful record of the past 
 generation, that greed which has manifested itself 
 in grasping imperialisms, in backstair diplomacies, 
 in intrigue and chicanery in high places, in the 
 exploitation of the weak by the strong, in the harsh 
 inequalities of the social order, is it to be wondered 
 at that the outraged moral order should have turned 
 upon us and plunged us into this pit of desolation 
 and sorrow ? " For the greater part of the seeming 
 prosperity of the world is," said John Ruskin in 
 1870, " so far as our present knowledge extends, 
 vain ; wholly useless for any kind of good but having 
 assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of de- 
 struction and sorrow." And the end of this sequence 
 
?8 The RED CAP on THE CROSS I 
 
 is upon us. Just as the small particle of snow upon 
 an Alpine mountain-side moves and gathers volume 
 in its movement until it sweeps upon the valley 
 beneath, a destructive avalanche, so the transgres- 
 sions and disobediences of men mount and multiply 
 to their certain nemesis of destruction and death. 
 The entail of sin cannot be broken. There is no 
 appeal from this law of moral continuity which 
 inexorably links up the sowing of sin to the harvest 
 of tragedy. 
 
 III.— Sin as Egoism 
 
 v Much of the responsibility for the moral self- 
 complacency of Sir Oliver Lodge's " higher man " 
 lies at the door of a type of evangelical tradition 
 whose treatment of sin has covered it with a theo- 
 logical mist of unreality. It would do the Church 
 no harm if those who direct its thinking were to 
 read with care and without prejudice what Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw has to say about salvationism in his 
 preface to Androcles and the Lion. Soon or late 
 we shall have to acknowledge the general accuracy 
 of his diagnosis of at least one factor in the decadence 
 of Christianity The common presentation of the 
 " gift of God " in terms of security and safety no 
 doubt touches a responsive chord in our self-regard- 
 ing instincts ; for we have not yet outgrown the 
 animal desire of self-preservation. But to lay the 
 major emphasis upon the idea of " escape " is to 
 pervert the essential point of the Gospel. Christian- 
 ity is not so untrue to the facts of life as to promise 
 
i CHANGE of HEART 79 
 
 us an escape from the consequences of our breaches 
 of the moral order. There is no such escape. For 
 sins done in the body or in the mind we have to pay 
 to the uttermost farthing ; and there is no exception 
 to this rule. The egoism which is at the root of 
 the Salvationist interpretation of Christianity has been 
 buttressed by a theology largely compounded of 
 eschatological materialism, forensic terminology, and 
 reminiscences of pagan rites. The result is that 
 the plain and immediate significance of this thing 
 that we call sin has been distorted, or at least con- 
 verted into an esoteric generalization which fails 
 to touch the actualities of life with any degree of 
 immediacy or vividness. And now that the fear 
 of hell has largely become obsolete as an ethical 
 motive, the " higher man of to-day " does not worry 
 about his sins. 
 
 But if this war does not teach him that sin leads 
 to hell, a very real and inevadable hell, then he is 
 incorrigible ; and we may be perfectly sure that 
 these hells are going to be recurrent until " the 
 higher man ' (whoever he may, after all, be) and 
 every other man begins to take his sin seriously. 
 More seriously, indeed, than even as a breach of the 
 moral order with its infallible " recompense of 
 reward." For when we speak of a moral order we 
 are using a thin and diffuse synonym for God. It 
 is high time that we recovered the habit of thinking 
 of ethics not as an affair of abstract ideals but of 
 personal relationships. It is convenient to speak 
 of liberty and honour and the like. But we intend 
 in doing so to hypostatize them and to ascribe to 
 them an indeoendent existence. But these are after 
 
80 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 all only names which describe particular kinds cf 
 relationship between men ; and they have no exist- 
 ence except as they exist in the mutual attitudes 
 of men. Similarly when we speak of a moral order 
 we are speaking of a pure abstraction unless we 
 conceive of it as the expression and ordering of a 
 personal will. It is not a scheme of enactments 
 which can be codified aud reduced to paper ; it is 
 not an objective legislation which operates by its 
 own momentum. It is the living continuous and 
 immediate direction and activity of the ultimate 
 Will of the Universe ; and the breach of the moral 
 order must be interpreted in terms of opposition 
 to that ultimate Will. But Will means personality ; 
 and our disobedience and transgression rank not 
 as offences against a code but as affairs between 
 persons, as the clash of wills, as the interruption 
 of a personal relationship. 
 
 This immediately transports the moral problem 
 of the world to another plane. The moral struggle 
 gains a new reality and a new hopefulness when it 
 is seen as the interaction and the co-operation of 
 living wills, and not as the desperate struggle of the 
 soul to conform to an abstract and fixed moral 
 order. The true nature of sin becomes clear. It is 
 misdirection of personality ; it is self-assertion — 
 at last — against God. St. Paul calls it roundly 
 enmity against God. And just because it is this, 
 it is remediable. If we were only the residuary 
 legatees of the anthropoid ape, we should have to 
 wait for the slow processes of evolution to deliver 
 us from this tragic entail. But because there is 
 another Party in the case, the problem is simplified. 
 
CHANGE of HEART 81 
 
 The presumption is indeed that — granted the good- 
 will of the second Party — the problem may be 
 settled out of hand. 
 
 But the moral order — what is it ? How is it to 
 be summarily defined in terms of actual conduct ? 
 Let us say provisionally that the divine order for 
 the world of human life reduced to human practice 
 is mutuality, reciprocity, " love thy neighbour as 
 thyself," and " we are members one of another." 
 .And stripped of all theological mystery, sin is simply 
 and only egoism, self-love. The sinner is the man 
 who is for himself alone ; and whether it be in the 
 publican or the Pharisee, in the gambler or the 
 grafter, in the sycophant or the tyrant whom he 
 flatters, it is always this same thing. "When," 
 says the Theologia Germanica, " the creature claimeth 
 for its own anything good, such as Substance, Know- 
 ledge, Life, Power and, in short, whatever we should 
 call good, as if it were that or possessed that ... as 
 often as this cometh to pass, the creature goeth 
 astray. What did the devil do else or what was 
 his going astray but that he claimed for himself 
 to be also somewhat and would have it that some- 
 what was his and something was due to him. This 
 setting up of a claim, and his I, and Me, and Mine 
 — these were his going astray and his fall. And so 
 it is to this day." There, as simply as possible, 
 is the central mystery of sin. It is any kind of 
 unsocial or antisocial conduct ; but it does not end 
 there. It is not only, let it be repeated, an offence 
 against an abstract morality. That which is anti- 
 social relative to man is antisocial relative to God. 
 To sin is to break with God, to make oneself an 
 
 6 
 
82 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 outlaw in God's world, And all the way from the 
 mean tippler who spends on his drought}' throat 
 what should go to his children's empty stomachs, 
 to the despot who fattens on the servitude of the 
 weak, sin is at once a wronging of man and rebellion 
 against God. 
 
 This is the central fact upon which our eyes must 
 be firmly fixed if we are to think accurately upon 
 the mission of Christianity. Sin is not a mysterious 
 distemper to be talked about in the large. It is 
 this radical schism between man and man, between 
 man and God. " The wisdom of the ancients," 
 says Lamennais, " gave to Satan the name of 
 Ahriman or ruler of those who have no ruler. It 
 says also : The man who gives utterance to the 
 word Me is a devil. The Wisdom of God says, 
 Vae Soli, woe to the man who is alone. This saying 
 is pregnant with meaning, and contains in itself the 
 whole mystery of sin. Sin being a principle of 
 egoism and isolation it forces each to lose himself 
 in his own individuality. The insatiable moi breathes 
 in all that lies around it ; it swells itself, develops, 
 grows steadily and absorbs all that is weaker than 
 it . . . and it can be stopped in its progress only 
 by another tyrant equal to it or superior to it in 
 strength. There is a struggle, bloody, pitiless ; and 
 the hideous society which is composed of these 
 things is but the seething mass of hungry com- 
 batants who come together only to devour one 
 another. . . . This is the state of which sin has 
 made us citizens ... we have become slaves of 
 the devil, who flatters our desires for independence 
 while he loads us with chains, and whether they 
 
CHANGE of HEART 83 
 
 will or not, subdues to the discipline of his army 
 the deserters from God." The reaction of sin upon 
 mankind is to divide it into two classes : the top • 
 dog and the under-dog, the exploiter and the ex- 
 ploited. The impulse of self-love puts the strong 
 man on the throne and the weak man under his 
 feet. Not that the weaker man has less self-love, 
 but he has less capacity, less power ; and in the 
 scramble for the prizes of self-love, he goes under 
 and the strong man rides him. The chronic his- 
 torical gulf betweeen privilege and disinheritance, 
 the recurrence of war — the whole length and breadth 
 of our human tragedy — is tc be traced at last to this 
 radical egoism. 
 
 It is difficult to say which condition, that of the 
 top-dog or that of the under-dog, is the more demoral- 
 izing. The top-dog becomes hardened and brutal- 
 ized, the under dog is crushed and dehumanized. 
 The tyrant grows more tyrannous, the serf more 
 servile. The despot tightens the bands of coercion ; 
 and in self-defence the helot counters it with cunning. 
 On the one hand, despotic power, pride, arrogance 
 breed a moral insensibility hardly curable ; on the 
 other, oppression and fear lead to deceit and shifti- 
 ness and all the meaner tactics of self-preservation. 
 It is a historical commonplace that long-continued 
 oppression breaks the moral backbone of a class or 
 a people ; and even the disinherited reproduce 
 among themselves the predatory habits of the 
 privileged, prey upon one another as their masters 
 prey upon them. " One could not be blind or deaf," 
 says Lord Morley in his Recollections, " to the obvious 
 fact that the bitterest complaints on the lips of the 
 
84 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 Irish tenant were constantly to be found directed 
 not against his landlord, but either against his father 
 for dividing the farm, or his brother for marrying, 
 or his neighbour for bidding against him. The 
 efforts of the League (the Land League) have been 
 as much directed against the covetousness of tenants 
 in the face of one another as against the covetousness 
 of landlords and agents ." ' And it is useless to 
 suppose that a proletarian state — from which all 
 sectional privileges may have been banished — can 
 escape this deadly disintegration except it be born 
 of a moral revolution. There have been times when 
 the under-dog, baited beyond further endurance, has 
 turned upon his tormentor ; and these are indeed 
 the brightest passages in secular history But 
 revolution does not mean the removing of the 
 leprosy, but only the redistribution of it. The under- 
 dog may become top-dog ; but the old canker has 
 not disappeared. It has only changed its place. 
 We shall never create a living society until we are 
 cleansed of the leprosy of self-love. Life will remain 
 an everlasting squalid scramble. 
 
 The whole problem came before Jesus one day 
 in a very simple and vivid form. A man came and 
 asked him to bid his brother divide the inheritance 
 with him. It was the old familiar squabble about 
 a dead man's property. The stronger party had 
 grabbed it ; and the weaker was left out in the cold. 
 It was a case of plain and palpable injustice. But 
 Jesus went right past the material injustice to the 
 moral heart of the quarrel. The disinherited brother 
 was morally no better than the other ; he was in 
 the grip of the same disease. And much graver than 
 
CHANGE of HEART 85 
 
 the injustice he had suffered was the moral twist 
 in his own heart. Jesus's comment on the affair 
 was " Beware of covetousness " ; and the word went 
 to the root of that affair and every other affair of 
 the kind — from a family quarrel over an estate to 
 an international dispute about a piece of territory 
 or a commercial advantage. 
 
 IV. — Moral Revolution 
 
 There is a great passage in Newman's Apologia 
 where he describes with his own characteristic power 
 the scene of confusion and miser y which human 
 history presents, and which he calls " this heart- 
 piercing, reason-bewildering spectacle.". For him it 
 meant that either there was no creator or that "this 
 living society of man is in a true sense discarded 
 from His presence." Newman explained it by 
 supposing that the " human race was implicated 
 in some terrible aboriginal catastrophe " ; but 
 v/hether we accept Newman's explanation or another, 
 one cannot look abroad upon the world, especially 
 as we see it to-day, with any degree of moral realism 
 and then share the perky levity of Sir Oliver Lodge's 
 " higher man." The literature of the world and 
 the common life of man are too replete with tragedy 
 and sorrow, with remorse and calamity, springing 
 directly from this thing, to make it possible for 
 sane men to dispose of it by a well-meaning gesture. 
 We are confronted with an organic perversity in 
 human nature ; and the problem of creating a 
 society is the problem of " a change of heart. 1 
 
 j > 
 
86 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 That this perversity may be plausibly explained 
 as the residuum of our inheritance from the forest 
 and the jungle is obvious ; and if this were all, then 
 we might hopefully assume that man would outgrow 
 his unhappy inheritance. In which case there 
 would be nothing for it but to wait patiently for the 
 millennium. But this view does not square with 
 the facts of the case. The history of man is not 
 that of a steady ascent in moral achievement ; it 
 is an affair of ups and downs, of high aspirations 
 and deplorable apostasies, of splendid leaps forward 
 and of calamitous backslidings. We are compelled, 
 I think, by the facts, to accept some such doctrine 
 of a moral duality as St. Paul describes in the seventh 
 chapter of Romans, and which in one form or another 
 may be found in writings anterior to his. And the 
 question is whether there is not some well-attested 
 way of effecting that organic transformation which 
 we call a change of heart. Clearly we have the 
 materials of a change of heart within us. How 
 then is that readjustment to be carried out which 
 will give to " the law of the mind " an effective 
 ascendancy over " the law in the members," how — to 
 use the great Pauline antithesis — is the spirit to 
 subdue the flesh? Or, once more, to state it in our 
 own terms, how are our native social instincts to 
 gain the upper hand over our natural anti-social 
 bias ? This inner contradiction — how is it to 
 be resolved in favour of the moral and spiritual 
 self? 
 
 The primary assumption concerning man with 
 which Jesus set out was his need of a change of heart. 
 He cherished the hope of human perfectibility with- 
 
CHANGE of HEART 87 
 
 out forgetting the fact of human perversity ; and 
 his first word to man was " Repent." Throughout 
 the New Testament, this process is consistently 
 described in terms of revolution or reversal. The 
 great characteristic words are Conversion, Regener- 
 ation, Resurrection (Ephesians ii. 1), Redemption, 
 and Reconciliation. It is a transformation and a 
 new beginning, life for death, liberty for bondage, 
 fellowship for enmity. It is true that the New 
 Testament speaks of it predominantly as being a 
 revolution in respect of the attitude to God ; but 
 it no less requires that this change shall effect a 
 co-ordinate revolution in the attitude to man. When 
 Jesus said Repent, He meant Turn around ; it was 
 a single act with a two-fold reaction. It set man 
 right both with God and man — not so much setting 
 him right with the one by setting him right with 
 the other, as setting him right with both at the 
 one stroke by giving him a change of heart. This 
 need and fact of conversion must be restored to the 
 central place in the immediate and practical aim 
 of the Church if it is to make a real and substantial 
 contribution to the remaking of the world. It is 
 not necessary at this time of day to apologize for 
 a belief in conversion ; nor does it invalidate its 
 genuineness as a process that the juvenile science 
 of psychology supposes that it can explain it. The 
 fact remains that, whether by an " eruption from 
 the subconscious" or by "making connection with 
 the higher powers," men are converted ; and the 
 condition of conversion is repentance. Only, if 
 repentance and conversion are again to have a real 
 meaning to the world, they must be charged with 
 
88 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 an ethical realism, at once more comprehensive 
 and more radical than that which has commonly 
 characterized the conventional view of them in 
 our generation. 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NEW MAN 
 
 I. — The Gospel of " Benefits " 
 
 THE Christian is one who is converted and 
 committed to the Kingdom of God, which is 
 at once a social vision and a way of life. He 
 accepts a certain scale of values and a par- 
 ticular view of the ends of life. But the appointed 
 aim of the gospel has been confused and foiled by 
 a persistent acknowledgment in practice of a dual 
 scale of values. This is to be traced, like the Salva- 
 tionist emphasis to which it is related, to the power 
 of our egoism to twist to its own purposes the very 
 Gospel that was given to deliver us from it. 
 
 A woman once came to me at a mothers' meeting 
 and expressed a desire to join. I told her she was 
 indeed welcome. Then she asked, " What are the 
 benefits " ? I knew she meant blankets, coal tickets, 
 Christmas dinners, and the like ; and I told her that 
 there were no benefits. Like the rich young noble she 
 went away sorrowful, even indeed a little indignant 
 that she had had so much trouble for nothing. But 
 that woman was typical of all of us ; that is the 
 chronic question — " What are the benefits ? " 
 What are we going to get out of it ? How shall 
 we make the best of both worlds ? 
 
 Some for the glories of this world ; and some 
 Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come. 
 
 But most people want both. Here, we say, is one 
 
 world, the physical and temporal, with its own 
 
 8 9 
 
go The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 peculiar prizes to offer ; and there is the other, 
 the unseen, with another quite different set of 
 prizes. The problem is how are we to get the utmost 
 out of both, a substantial bank-balance here and a 
 safe reservation hereafter ; how secure treasure both 
 in this world and in the world to come ? But this 
 attempt to reap a double harvest is foredoomed to 
 failure. In the matter of prizes the next world 
 cannot compete on fair terms with this. Its prizes 
 are remoter, more problematical ; they have no 
 market value and are not quoted on the Stock Ex- 
 change lists. A piece of real estate yields to most 
 professing Christians, I suspect, more solid comfort 
 than a prospective mansion in the skies. So the 
 real estate interests come first. We want to get 
 on in this world and to get safely into the next. 
 Very well, then ; it's business for the one and religion 
 for the other. But meantime chiefly business. 
 We will squeeze out of this world what we can, as 
 honestly as we can, six days of the week ; and we 
 will stake out a claim in the next by keeping up a 
 nodding acquaintance with religion around the 
 week-end, and by being charitable so far as our 
 means allow. 
 
 Now beneath this view there lies a stupendous, 
 though quite obvious error. Though there may be 
 two worlds, there is only one life, and that life is 
 continuous and indivisible. Speaking of the 
 German threat of war in July 1914, Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw said to his countrymen that they could not go 
 on for years calling themselves " the boys of the 
 bulldog breed," and then suddenly turn round and 
 say that they were gazelles. Clearly, we cannot 
 
The NEW MAN 91 
 
 do that kind of thing. We cannot break the in- 
 exorable continuity of life ; and it is stupid to 
 imagine that men can spend their main energies 
 upon becoming successful business men through life, 
 and then because they have kept on visiting terms 
 with a church be transfigured into first-class saints 
 when they die. Moneybags are not so easily con- 
 vertible into haloes. The fact is that the scale of 
 values which governs life hereafter must govern 
 life here ; and the scale of values which w T e have 
 accepted in this world will follow us into the next. 
 He is that is filthy shall be filthy still, and he that 
 is greedy shall be greedy still. Only with this 
 difference — that desire remains without the means 
 of satisfaction. That is what Jesus means when 
 He speaks of " where their worm dieth not and their 
 fire is not quenched." And it is childish to suppose 
 that an eleventh-hour repentance will restore the 
 years that the locust of self-seeking and the canker 
 of greed have eaten. There is but one life, one scale 
 of values, here and hereafter ; for there is but one 
 moral order, if so be that there is but one God. 
 
 II. — Creating Moral Personality 
 
 Conversion is not a magical process by which one 
 qualifies for certain deferred benefits. It is the creation 
 of a moral personality which is forthwith governed 
 by the values of the Kingdom of God. It is — as 
 has already been said — a setting right with God ; and 
 this is something more than an empty commonplace. 
 In some evangelical quarters there is a very strong 
 
 / 
 
92 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 emphasis upon an experience which is called 
 Assurance ; and while it is commonly spoken of 
 as a present certainty of ultimate escape, it does, 
 properly understood, possess a much deeper and 
 worthier content. There is in it a certain sense of 
 being settled upon bedrock, of having touched 
 some final reality. It is as though life had been 
 redeemed from vagrancy and established on a base. 
 Professor Josiah Royce quotes in The Sources of 
 Religious Insight, the story of a business man caught 
 in some delinquency and put in prison. There he 
 faces the problems of life ; and when a young man 
 comes to him to submit the question of marrying 
 his daughter, he says : " They haven't the point 
 of view. It is life that is the great adventure. 
 Not love, not marriage, not business. They are 
 just chapters in the book. The main thing is to 
 take the road fearlessly — to have courage to live 
 one's life." 
 
 " Courage ? " 
 
 Lannithorne nodded. 
 
 " That is the great word. Don't you see what 
 ails your father's point of view and my wife's ? 
 One wants absolute security in one way for Ruth ; 
 the other wants absolute security in another way 
 for you. And security — it is just the one thing a 
 human being can't have; the thing that's damnation 
 to him if he gets it ! The reason it is so hard for a 
 rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven is that 
 he has that false sense of security. To demand it 
 just disintegrates a man. I don't know why. It 
 does." 
 
 Oliver shook his head uncertainly. 
 
The NEW MAN 93 
 
 "I don't quite follow you, sir. Oughtn't one to 
 try to be safe ? " 
 
 " One ought to try, yes. That is common pru- 
 dence. But the point is that, whatever you do or 
 get you aren't after all secure. There is no such 
 condition ; and the harder you demand it the more 
 risk you run. So it is up to a man to take all reason- 
 able precautions about his money or his happiness 
 or his life, and trust the rest. What every man is 
 looking for is the sense of having the mastery over 
 life. But I will tell you, boy, there is only one thing 
 that really gives it." 
 
 " And that is . . . ? " 
 
 Lannithorne hesitated perceptibly. For the thing 
 he was about to tell this undisciplined lad was his 
 most precious possession ; it was the prize of wisdom 
 for which he had paid with the years of his life. 
 No man parts lightly with such knowledge. 
 
 " It comes," he said with an effort, " with the 
 knowledge of our power to endure. That's it. You 
 are safe only when yon can stand everything that can 
 happen to you. ..." 
 
 And this is the point to which conversion should 
 bring a man, else he is not (to borrow a Salvation 
 Army phrase) soundly converted. It is to have 
 achieved the sense of a standing from which nothing 
 can dislodge us, to be able to face the world without 
 fear, and to fare forth gaily into the dark of the 
 future. One who had endeavoured with some faith- 
 fulness to serve his fellows was asked by a well- 
 meaning stranger whether he was saved. And the 
 answer gravely given was : " I do not care ; I am not 
 concerned about it/' To have lost concern about 
 
94 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 it — that is salvation. It is the consciousness of 
 having found and purchased the pearl of great price, 
 of possessing a Kingdom that cannot be moved, 
 which enables us to meet all the vicissitudes of life 
 and death ; " gentlemen unafraid." With this goes 
 a certain sense of deliverance from the tyranny of 
 things. At least it enables us to see things in a true 
 perspective. We are still apt to suppose (Jesus 
 notwithstanding) that the fulness of life is con- 
 tingent upon the multitude of things that we possess ; 
 and mere possession becomes an aim. But real 
 freedom is to have gained independence of things 
 and a contempt for the accumulation of them ; to 
 sit lightly to our possessions and to make them 
 servants, not our lords. Saul of Tarsus, who seems 
 to have lacked none of the secular " prizes," who 
 indeed both by inheritance and achievement had 
 the whole world — certainly the only world he cared 
 about — at his feet, came to a time when he summed 
 up all his wealth of ancestry, attainment, and promise 
 in one word of supreme contempt. He called it 
 dung. He had undergone what Nietzsche would 
 have called " a transvaluation of values." In 
 Samuel Butler's Ercwhon, the sick man was sent 
 to prison and the man who told a lie to hospital ; 
 and for Paul, conversion was like walking straight 
 into a world where ah his conventional judgments 
 were turned upside down as sharply and as abruptly 
 as though he had walked into Erewhon. The change 
 wrought in him a condition which he described in 
 this way : " I have learnt in whatsoever state I am 
 therein to be content." Though he had forfeited 
 the things he once sought and prized, yet he had all 
 
The NEW MAN 95 
 
 that he needed. That is real wealth, to have all 
 one wants and to want no more than one needs. 
 And the secret of this condition is that sense of 
 inward sufficiency which conversion brings with it, 
 that consciousness of possessing inalienably the pearl 
 of great price. Having that, a man wants little 
 more — food and drink, work to do, a few good books, 
 friendship, the love of a good woman, the laughter 
 of little children round about him — a few elementary 
 things of this kind ; and perhaps not even all of 
 these. 
 
 This is not that doctrine of " being content in 
 that station of life in which it has pleased Providence 
 to place us," which the rich are so anxious to have 
 preached to the poor. It is a lesson that the poor 
 have learnt ; they know how few are the things 
 that are necessary to happiness. If to-day they 
 are rising to demand a larger share of the material 
 things that they produce, it is because the rich have 
 not been content in the station of life to which 
 Providence called them. They have ground the faces 
 of the poor in order to elevate their own station ; 
 and because they have too much, the poor have 
 too little. This gospel is essentially one to be 
 preached to the rich ; for back of our social con- 
 fusion is the bondage of the rich to their riches. 
 
 This sense of sufficiency and liberty is not gained 
 in a day. The entail of life is not so easily broken ; 
 and we have to reach this Kingdom through much 
 tribulation. There is no such thing as " sudden 
 conversion." The process may begin in an un- 
 expected moment ; but we have to work our passage 
 into peace and freedom. Little by little we shall 
 
96 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 disentangle ourselves from the meshes of the past, 
 and with patience win out at last. Conversion is 
 an act of emancipation ; it sets us free for the great 
 adventure of life. It clears our feet of the impedi- 
 menta of a materialized culture ; and it purges us 
 of fear. It brings us the knowledge that we can 
 stand all that can happen to us, the calm assurance 
 that beneath the fell blow of circumstance, though 
 our heads be bloody, they shall be unbowed. It 
 sets us on the way to the mastery of life, of the 
 world and ail that is in it. 
 
 III. — Conversion as Emancipation 
 
 This is not the way conversion is conceived where 
 it is most commonly spoken of. The assumption 
 behind the conventional view of conversion is that 
 the world is divided broadly into two classes : the 
 disreputable — consisting of drunkards and harlots, 
 gamblers and thieves ; and the respectable — the 
 decent, well-dressed, law-abiding folk who go to 
 church on Sundays. Conversion is the process which 
 turns the former into the latter. It is not usually 
 recalled that conversion has not infrequently turned 
 respectable men into wild and lawless persons, and 
 has made them (judged by the current orthodoxies) 
 into impossible cranks and dangerous firebrands. 
 The saint has often been regarded as a type of 
 criminal. 
 
 This truncated view of conversion springs from 
 a subtle and unrecognized legalism. The preacher 
 may tell us that we are not " under the law " ; and 
 
The NEW MAN 97 
 
 if it were the law of Moses alone that was in question 
 the preacher would be doubtless right. But our 
 freedom from the law of Moses has passed into a 
 bondage to the law of convention. We have identi- 
 fied righteousness with sittlichkeit. For the written 
 law we have substituted the unwritten law of 
 " consuetudinary practice." For most people, 
 Christian conduct is defined by conformity to the 
 customary rule of give-and-take in social conduct. 
 The new law may be less specific in detail ; yet it 
 is none the less acknowledged as a definition of moral 
 obligation. But freedom from the law does not 
 mean freedom from its demands but from its limi- 
 tations. We are not exempted from its spirit but 
 from its letter. We are free not to ignore it but to 
 transcend it. "I came not to destrov but to fulfil. " 
 There is no limit to moral obligation ; no standard 
 set at which a man having arrived he is able to say, 
 " I have attained." There is a creative quality, a 
 restless originality, in the released moral impulse 
 which drives it to outdo its own best, to stretch out 
 beyond its own highest achievements. It is not 
 satisfied with loving neighbours ; it presses on to 
 the love of enemies. Christian morality has a 
 starting-point but no terminus. It has a direction, 
 but no goal in sight. Conversion is misunderstood 
 unless it is regarded as a release of this creative moral 
 impulse, which may utterly reverse the former 
 manner of life, but which will always be impatient 
 to " exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
 Pharisees," and ever be true to itself through every- 
 thing. Whether our legalism gather around a 
 written code or unwritten convention, it obscures 
 
 7 
 
98 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 and indeed denies the true nature of the Christian 
 morality. 
 
 This is too common and persistent a heresy to be 
 traced to a particular contemporar}/ source, but 
 it has probably gained some countenance in our 
 time from the ethics of evolutionism. The doctrine 
 of gradual development implies that moral obliga- 
 tions are to be determined by the general moral 
 capacity of a people at that particular stage of the 
 upward ascent at which they may at a particular 
 moment have arrived. Within certain broad limits 
 this view is doubtless sound ; and if human freedom 
 were not a fact, it would be the whole truth of the 
 matter. But we know that men are capable both 
 of rising above and of falling below the general 
 moral average of their age ; and the moral obligation 
 of an individual is not to be measured by the capacity 
 of his neighbour, but by his own vision of moral 
 good. And by what test is the moral capacity of 
 a people at any point to be determined ? Is it to 
 be the customary planes of social correctness, or the 
 requirements of the state ? Or what ? " The only 
 possible test of reasonableness " (in the determin- 
 ation of conduct), said a British Member of Parlia- 
 ment the other day, " is what is accepted by the 
 consensus of opinion or conviction among contem- 
 porary men of the same stage of civilization." In 
 which case what becomes of the prophet, of that 
 remarkable succession of rebels and outlaws who 
 were without honour in their own age, but whom 
 popular romance has so consistently canonized, 
 with the consent of the moral judgment of their 
 posterity ? And what becomes of Jesus ? The 
 
The NEW MAN 99 
 
 logic of this view is that no man must be better 
 than his neighbour ; normality becomes the law 
 and the prophets ; conventionality the hall-mark 
 of holiness. But if the Kingdom of God be anything 
 at all, it is a realm of moral originality, a society 
 of moral pioneers. 
 
 IV. — Conversion as Vision 
 
 It is not enough to describe conversion in terms 
 of ethical contrasts. The moral consequences of 
 conversion are determined by the new principle of 
 value- judgment which it introduces. Conversion is 
 emancipation because it is also revelation. " Except 
 a man be born from above, he cannot see the King- 
 dom of God." But when he is born from above, 
 the Kingdom of God is the first thing he sees. This 
 perception has been defined in other ways ; to Paul 
 it was " the excellency of the knowledge of Christ 
 Jesus my Lord " ; William Blake called it Jerusalem. 
 But by whatever name you call it, it is essentially 
 the same experience. Its common name is vision. 
 
 Henri Poincare, in his book Science and Method, 
 tells us that his great mathematical discoveries 
 were made, not as the direct result of conscious 
 processes, but in quick flashes of insight. They 
 seemed to rise unbidden and unexpected to the 
 surface of his mind, on occasions remote from his 
 mathematical interests and under circumstances 
 wholly irrelevant to them. That this is capable 
 of simple psychological explanation may be true ; 
 but it suggests very clearly that we are capable 
 
ioo The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 of sound processes of perception outside of, if not 
 unconnected with, the machinery of ratiocination. 
 It is not to belittle the office of reason to deny that 
 it is our only organ for the ascertainment, of truth ; 
 and it is surely a very foolhardy dogmatism, in the 
 present rudimentary state of our knowledge of the 
 processes of the mind, that denies our capacity of 
 receiving news from regions far beyond those which 
 sense and reason are able to explore. And it is 
 specially presumptuous to do so in the face of that 
 succession of prophets and poets and seers who 
 claim to have spoken with God, and prove it by 
 the way in which they speak to men. We may be 
 sceptical of Blake's visions, though he was surer 
 of their truth than of the reality of the sense-world. 
 But we cannot reasonably be sceptical of the exist- 
 ence of casements in men's souls that look out upon 
 the eternal. Yet it is true of us that we have been 
 over-persuaded that the only light we can afford 
 to trust is the light of natural faculty ; and while 
 we pay lip-service to the idea of revelation in the 
 past, we have rationalized out of our scheme of 
 things the reality of vision in the present. To be 
 converted should mean that we are sensitive at 
 once to the movement of life in all its wonder, and 
 to the approach of the spirit of God. It is to live 
 where the veil of the unseen has been worn thin by 
 the prayer of ages, to dwell upon the open thresh- 
 old of that treasure house in which are stored the 
 riches of knowledge and wisdom, to have our tents 
 pitched upon the frontier line of the eternal where 
 we can catch glimpses of its light and hear echoes 
 of its song. This is the prerogative of the converted 
 
The NEW MAN 101 
 
 soul — to see the invisible, to hear " the drift of 
 pinions " at his door, to look upon 
 
 the traffic of Jacob's ladder 
 Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross : 
 
 and 
 
 Christ walking on the waters 
 Not of Gennesaret but Thames. 
 
 But this light also sheds its unearthly glory upon 
 this drab world of man and transfigures it. The 
 vision of God becomes the vision of man ; and more 
 to the purpose than seeing Christ walking on the 
 Thames is to see Him in the derelicts of the Thames 
 Embankment. Francis Thompson's good friend, 
 Mrs. Meynell, has carried his vision to a more effectual 
 and pregnant point : 
 
 Christ, in this man's life — 
 
 This stranger who is Thine — in all his strife, 
 
 All his felicity, his good and ill 
 
 In the assaulted stronghold of his will ; 
 
 1 do confess Thee here, 
 
 Alive within this life ; I know Thee near 
 Within this lonely conscience, closed away 
 Within this brother's solitary day. 
 
 Christ in his unknown heart, 
 His intellect unknown — this love, this art, 
 This battle and this peace, this destiny 
 That I shall never know, look upon me ! 
 
 Christ in his numbered breath, 
 Christ in his beating heart and in his death, 
 Christ in his mystery ! From that secret place 
 And from that separate dwelling, give me grace. 
 
102 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 V. — New Values and New Relations 
 
 It is this new evaluation of man that fixes the 
 specific quality and direction of Christian conduct. 
 We have indeed spoken much of the infinite value 
 of the soul ; and we have made all haste to save it 
 from the awaiting pit. But this was not the re- 
 action that Jesus called for. He bade us see the 
 image and the superscription of the Son of Man 
 upon every man and so carry ourselves. This 
 doctrine of the absolute worth of the soul is the 
 first assumption of Christianity. It is written broad 
 and deep over the face of the New Testament. The 
 whole weight of the Christian tradition rests upon 
 the view that God thought man so much worth 
 that He gave so that even He could not give more, 
 in order to redeem him. " He spared not His own 
 Son." And it belongs to this conception of human 
 worth that it is wholly unaffected by those consider- 
 ations which enter so deeply into men's judgments 
 of one another. We are apt to cast whole classes 
 of men into a sub-human category because they 
 chance either in the circumstances of their birth 
 or their social standing or their race to be in our 
 view inferior to ourselves ; and our judgments of 
 men are profoundly affected by our view of their 
 moral condition, so incorrigible is our Pharisaism. 
 But the valuation of man by God takes account 
 neither of the accidents of his condition nor of his 
 moral state. Beneath all these the eye of God sees 
 His own image, the essential man ; and that is the 
 first fixed point for all Christian thinking. Its 
 primary postulate is the absolute worth of person- 
 
The NEW MAN 103 
 
 ality ; and it seeks to order the life of men by calling 
 them to devote themselves neither to an object 
 of the imagination nor to an object of sense, but 
 to what is neither and yet is both — to man himself. 
 
 And it leads us from this point to another. We 
 are not only to accept God's evaluation of us ; but 
 we are to bear ourselves toward such other as God 
 has borne Himself toward us. The words commonly 
 called the Golden Rule clearly are no more than 
 a broad interpretation of the highest point reached 
 in ethical perception at that time. It is " the law 
 and the prophets." But Jesus carries us farther 
 and deeper. For " do unto others as ye would that 
 they should do unto you," He virtually substitutes 
 " do unto others as God does unto you." We are 
 to love not our neighbours only, but our enemies, 
 " that we may be the children of our Father," who 
 does these indiscriminating things. The same prin- 
 ciple appears repeatedly in the Epistles. " Be kind 
 to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one an- 
 other as God in Christ hath forgiven you." " As 
 God hath loved us, so ought we to love one another." 
 " Copy God, then, as His beloved children and lead 
 lives of love just as Christ loved you." 
 
 There is no question that the word which enters 
 most deeply into the heart of the New Testament 
 thought of God's attitude to man is reconciliation. 
 Propitiation and redemption are figures of speech ; 
 and like all figures of speech accepted too literally, 
 they have imported certain alien elements into the 
 discussion of the matter in hand. The pagan-altar 
 and the slave-market no doubt may yield fruitful 
 sidelights upon the main issue ; but they are not to 
 
104 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 be taken as precise images of the great transactions 
 of God with the estranged soul. The word which 
 describes those transactions directly — so far as any 
 human word can do so — is the word " atonement ' 
 in its original connotation. The God whom we see 
 in the New Testament is one who spends His utmost 
 on overcoming the estrangement of His children, 
 and restoring them to Himself in the harmony of 
 fellowship and co-operation. It is not, be it remem- 
 bered, a picture of Omar Khayyam's God who is 
 " a good fellow," nor of Coventry Patmore's senti- 
 mental Father " who has pity on our childishness." 
 The Christian God is not represented as taking sin 
 so lightly and as disposing of it by the simple process 
 of ignoring it. Reconciliation is treated in the New 
 Testament as a transaction of infinite costliness ; 
 and it is only a shallow view of life and personality 
 that can conceive of it as a facile condonation of 
 offences. It is never that, even in our imperfect 
 human relationships. There is a certain tempera- 
 mental levity which can shake off the remembrance 
 of injury with a toss of the head, and in a casual 
 moment shake hands and let bygones be bygones. 
 But the restoration of a broken friendship is not so 
 cheaply purchased. Where the offence cuts deepest, 
 forgiveness is most costly — especially if it be carried 
 through to a perfect end. Jesus in one of his parables 
 likens sin to a bad debt, and the forgiveness of sin 
 to the cancellation of the debt ; but it is even more 
 than that. It is to restore the debtor to his former 
 position, to resume business with him on the old 
 terms. It is not mere release or absolutism ; it is 
 the positive recreation of a disrupted harmony, so 
 
The NEW MAN 105 
 
 that the new shall be even better and richer than 
 the old. This is not a thing that happens ; it re- 
 quires set purpose and energy. No man drifts into 
 forgiveness ; forgiveness needs the will to forgive. 
 
 But in the New Testament account of recon- 
 ciliation, the will to forgive is not represented as 
 waiting upon the penitence of the offender. It 
 does not bide its time till the delinquent comes 
 back ; it goes out to bring him back. It deliberately 
 endeavours to quicken repentance ; and does not 
 leave the restoration to chance or to the caprice of 
 the offender. The Father of Jesus Christ makes it 
 as nearly impossible as it may be for the offender 
 to stay away ; and the whole strength of the appeal 
 of the Gospel rests upon the assumption that the 
 whole mind and heart of God are gathered up in 
 His purpose to recreate His fellowship with His 
 creatures. 
 
 All this is quite clearly reflected in Jesus's view 
 of the mutual relations of men. He has much to 
 say about offences and forgiveness ; and what he 
 does say is quite explicit — both to the offender and 
 to the offended. The offender has to make resti- 
 tution to his brother before his offering is acceptable 
 to God ; and the offended brother has to forgive 
 the offender if he is to receive the forgiveness of 
 God. Rightness with God and Tightness with man 
 go consistently together. But just as God seeks 
 out the occasion of forgiveness, so also is the offended 
 man to go forth to create the conditions of recon- 
 ciliation with his offending neighbour. This is the 
 whole meaning of the passage concerning the turn- 
 ing of the other cheek. " Resist not evil " said 
 
106 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 Jesus ; and what He meant was " Do not waste 
 your time in resisting evil ; your business is to 
 overcome and convert the evil will ; and when a 
 man strikes you on one cheek, you must overcome 
 the evil in him, not by breaking his head, but by 
 that more fundamental thing — breaking his heart. 
 Abstain not only from revenge, but from the appear- 
 ance of resentment. Counter and conquer your 
 adversary by an unconquerable goodwill." As St. 
 Paul puts it, " Heap coals of fire on his head." 
 
 The way in which Jesus treats this matter of 
 offences affords a clue to the essential principle of 
 the ethics of the Kingdom. Mutuality, reciprocity, 
 fellowship — here is the rule. Professor Rauschen- 
 busch's definition of love comes to mind again — 
 " the energy of a steadfast will bent on creating fellow- 
 ship." Reconciliation as between God and man is 
 a great social transaction ; and this transaction — 
 in every possible variation and application — is to 
 be reproduced in human relationships. The King- 
 dom of God is a society of men who give themselves 
 to each other in " love without a limit." This 
 presupposes that new view of man which has already 
 been spoken of and which establishes him as the end 
 of life for his brother. The supreme " value " for 
 men is man. The other man is a personality to 
 which I am to give my all, a brother to be bound 
 to myself in consistent and infrangible good-will. 
 No matter who or what he is — he is to be the object 
 of my devotion. His standing, his nationality, his 
 moral condition — none of these is of any account. 
 The true Christian is he who can take on his lips 
 and make his own his Master's word, " Him that 
 
The NEW MAN 107 
 
 cometh to Me" — be he "tinker, tailor, soldier, 
 sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief " — 
 " him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." 
 The Christian ethic is an affair of redemptive personal 
 relationships. The natural reaction of a genuine 
 Christian life is the creation of a living, life-giving 
 fellowship. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 JUDGMENT AND MERCY 
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE, in a striking story, 
 describes Pontius Pilate, grown old and 
 obese, taking a summer cure at a Roman 
 watering-place ; and, in answer to a friend, 
 only recalling faintly and with difficulty the trial 
 and execution of Jesus. To the political mind it was 
 no more than a troublesome affair well and finally 
 disposed of by throwing its cause to the yelping 
 hounds that wanted Him for a prey. Even now, 
 when we reflect, with some measure of detachment, 
 upon the actual circumstances, it seems singular 
 that the squalid and contemptible end of an obscure 
 peasant in an obscure land should have become 
 the master-fact of human history. 
 
 The truth is that the instinct of mankind discerns 
 certain elements in this episode which are not to be 
 measured by the common foot-rule of historical 
 judgment. We seem to move here in a region of 
 absolute moral values, where circumstances of time 
 and place, of publicity and obscurity, of size and 
 numbers, sink into a position of relative unimpor- 
 tance. The event is historical, but it is also super- 
 historic. It moves on a plane of timelessness. 
 The first but certainly the least thing that we say 
 of the Cross is that it happened on a certain day 
 at a certain place. The date of the Cross is not a 
 particular day, but all time ; the local setting of 
 the Cross is not Jerusalem, but the round earth. 
 The Cross is the supreme moral crisis of the world, 
 the epitome and symbol of its moral tragedy, and 
 of its hope. 
 
JUDGMENT and MERCY 109 
 
 I. — The Necessity of the Cross 
 
 The shadow of the Cross is cast over the whole 
 recorded life of Jesus ; and in a very profound sense, 
 Joseph Parker's saying that " on earth He was 
 never off the Cross " is true. But it is possible to 
 fix with some precision the point at which Jesus 
 saw clearly that there could be no other issue to 
 His ministry than a violent death at the hands of 
 the guardians of the status quo and of the ancient 
 traditions. He was too deeply versed in the story 
 of the prophets to suppose that He would escape 
 their fate. He saw that the Son of Man " must 
 go up to Jerusalem . . . and be crucified," and a 
 moment came when He set his face steadfastly to 
 go to Jerusalem. 
 
 Professor Burkitt has pointed out that the first 
 turning-point in the public ministry of Jesus came 
 on the Sabbath-day on which He healed the man 
 with the withered hand in the synagogue. On that 
 day Jesus left the synagogue, and only once, and that 
 in his own town of Nazareth, did he enter the syna- 
 gogue again. This new departure appears to signify 
 a definite abandonment on Jesus's part of the hope 
 which underlay the synagogue ministry — that the 
 Kingdom of God could be floated on the tide of a 
 religious revival within the existing religious institu- 
 tions. He had gone through the synagogues of 
 Galilee preaching the Kingdom ; but the tradition- 
 alists grew increasingly hostile, until that fateful 
 Sabbath-day when the opposition reached a climax 
 and drove Jesus out into the open world, like many 
 a prophet before Him and after. He saw that as 
 
no The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 things were, His Good News of vision and emanci- 
 pation was falling on ears not only unhealing but 
 unwilling to hear. It is true that the common 
 people heard him gladly ; but it is idle to base upon 
 this single saying, as sometimes we do, an argument 
 of His abiding acceptability to the multitude. Of 
 course the people heard Him gladly. % The oppressed 
 multitude is always ready to turn its ear to any man 
 who comes to it with a word of hope, however 
 illusory it may be. This is what gives the quack, 
 the charlatan, the demagogue, his chance. Jesus, 
 like every prophet, had his periods of favour at the 
 hands of the very populace which at last demanded 
 His death. So little did He Himself esteem the 
 fervour which His first preaching had evoked that 
 He deliberately withdrew from the only circumstances 
 in which He might have gained a popular following. 
 At the last, He had around Him but a handful of 
 people who understood and believed in Him. So 
 far as His own peculiar mission was concerned, it 
 was understood by the people as little as it was liked 
 by the authorities. 
 
 For this there were probably many reasons ; it 
 was no doubt in part due to the prevailing form 
 of the nationalistic hope. Jesus did not correspond 
 to the expectation of a strong captain, a leader of 
 hosts who would rally the people around a banner 
 of liberty, overthrow the Roman tyranny and re- 
 establish the political independence of the nation. 
 There was also the inveterate hostility of the tradi- 
 tionalist to innovation, of the official to the unac- 
 credited. But beneath and through these things 
 was the radical egoism which had divided that 
 
JUDGMENT and MERCY in 
 
 society, as it divides every society, against itself. 
 Economically, it was a self-devouring mass of para- 
 sites, a people who lived off each other. But deadlier 
 than the economic disintegration was the moral 
 schism that rent them in twain — the self-complacency 
 of the religious and their contempt of the outcast. 
 The parable of the Pharisee and the publican gives 
 us a picture of malignant social leprosy ; and how- 
 ever pernicious a thing economic exploitation may 
 be, it is comparatively innocuous by the side of the 
 spiritual pride that can throw the outcast into a 
 sub-human category and exalt the practice of 
 ostracism to the plane of a grace. It is character- 
 istic of Jesus that He immediately made common 
 cause with the outcast. It was laid to His charge 
 by the " unco' guid " that He " sat with publicans 
 and sinners." But this He did, not because the 
 publicans and sinners had more virtue than their 
 contemptuous neighbours, but because they had 
 more need. To Jesus it was enough that they were 
 outcast. They were the proper objects of an im- 
 pulse which made for the creation of fellowship 
 and the inclusion of the " outs " in a family of God. 
 It must not be overlooked in this connection, 
 that Jesus in speaking of his mission described Him- 
 self consistently as the Son of Man ; and if we are 
 to take it that not only the name but its symbolic 
 meaning is derived from Daniel's vision, we must 
 further assume that Jesus regarded Himself as the 
 symbol and protagonist of humanity against all 
 dehumanizing things. " The Son of Man," and 
 " the Kingdom of God " must not be separated 
 from one another. When He claimed that the Son 
 
H2 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 of Man was Lord of the Sabbath, He was affirming 
 the primacy of humanity in the Kingdom of God. 
 This does not mean that He was only a humanist ; 
 on the contrary, He was as far removed as possible 
 from that insidious humanism which has invaded 
 popular religion in our day and which makes God 
 ancillary to human ends. But Jesus's thought of 
 the place of man in the divine purpose made him a 
 humanist in the sense that He believed God's ends 
 could only be achieved through a redeemed human 
 society. He does not indeed say it in so many 
 words, but it is a fair inference from His words and 
 attitudes that the Kingdom of God implied a vision 
 of mankind integrated into an organic co-operative 
 whole by the cohesive energy of a love which denied 
 itself to no man. But this regenerated society was 
 made impossible by the deadly and blinding egoism 
 which not only was eating into the social body like 
 a leprosy, but also made men incapable of perceiving 
 those spiritual values which break the power of 
 secular good, and set free the creative and integrating 
 activities of love. 
 
 When Jesus, after His breach with the synagogue, 
 went into retirement with His little company of 
 disciples, it was assuredly no less to think out His 
 own personal problem than to train the twelve. 
 His first approach to His task had been foiled by 
 the perversity of men ; and He perceived that if 
 this obstruction was to be broken down, there was 
 need of some method more drastic than preaching. 
 It is something more than conjecture to suppose 
 that His sense of necessity — that He must go to 
 Jerusalem — was born of the conviction that the 
 
JUDGMENT and MERCY 113 
 
 only plan which would enable Him to overcome the 
 obstinate waywardness of His brethren was to show 
 them their sin in its ultimate consequence, to let 
 their sin work out its logic to the bitter end. Then 
 perchance they would discern what it was that 
 ailed them. 
 
 It is likely that Jesus was helped to this conclusion 
 by reflecting upon the experience of the prophets 
 and upon the picture of " the suffering servant " 
 of God. But it seems clear that He deliberately 
 accepted for Himself the position of foil to the 
 mounting sin of His brethren. He set His face 
 steadfastly toward Jerusalem because He chose to 
 reveal to men the nature of their moral trouble by 
 suffering in His own person its utmost consequences 
 before their eyes. And so at last it came to pass. 
 
 What happened to Jesus had in kind happened 
 before. It had happened to Jeremiah, it happened 
 wheresoever a prophet was stoned. The same thing 
 is happening to-day. The sin of man is working 
 out its remorseless logic on the battlefields of Europe. 
 But the Cross has its own uniqueness. Historical 
 judgments upon human sin — such as the present 
 war — are seen through the haze of human imper- 
 fections in a twilight of mixed motives of good and 
 evil ; and the innocent suffer with the guilty. But 
 when sin broke upon Jesus, it was seen in its true 
 colour, darkness against light, black against white, 
 with no blurred edges and no twilight zone ; and 
 the innocent suffered alone. It is this which invests 
 the Cross with a super-historic quality ; it is a reve- 
 lation of something like absolute moral values. 
 Hell seemed to be burning through in Jerusalem 
 
 8 
 
ii4 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 that day. The mask was off and sin stalked the 
 streets and swarmed the hill in all its black horror ; 
 and over against it was the moral splendour of the 
 Crucified. 
 
 The death of Jesus was the logical end of sin, 
 the fated conclusion of its natural reactions. In 
 the destruction of the Son of Man, the incarnation 
 of essential manhood, we have the eternal symbol 
 of the anti-social nature and effects of sin. It 
 gathered itself up to extinguish the spirit of love 
 in which alone is the hope of our healing. The 
 Cross was not alone a denial of and an affront to 
 the divine holiness ; it was that, truly ; but it was 
 that because it was first an assault upon man, an 
 a denial of the love by which it is ordained that 
 man shall live and grow. The crucifixion of Jesus 
 remains the- supreme instance and symbol of that 
 contempt of personality which is the first reaction 
 of egoism and the unchanging hindrance to fellow- 
 ship. The Cross is the whole wide tragedy of man- 
 kind focussed down to one single point of darkness. 
 
 But the Cross revealed much more than the truth 
 about sin. In the annals of human suffering there 
 is surely no storjf comparable to the deliberate, 
 systematic, pitiless crucifixion of the Polish people. 
 For a century it has gone on ; and the mounting 
 tale of a nation's anguish was reproduced in the 
 hearts of its exiied sons. Some of these it drove 
 back upon God ; and as they were pressed more 
 closely to the heart of God, bitterness and vengeful- 
 ness died within them, and out of their hearts came 
 echoing the last word of the heart of God. Sygmunt 
 Krasinski, in whom Polish idealism reached its high- 
 
JUDGMENT and MERCY 115 
 
 water mark, sings his latest songs to the key of the 
 everlasting mercy This is his clearest, his con- 
 quering note, the thing that he learnt at the heart 
 of God. 
 
 And above the confusion of Calvary, through all 
 the tumult and the clamour of the mob, there came 
 a word, " Father, forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do." Above the noise of Hell was heard 
 the conquering word of the everlasting mercy — the 
 last word of God over against the worst deed of man. 
 There is a note of the ultimate in this prayer to which 
 human hearts have never ceased to respond, recog- 
 nizing in it a depth and a reach of charity essentially 
 divine. It has come down the ages as the most 
 godlike word that ever fell on human hearing. For 
 all the infamy, the lust, the blindness which broke 
 upon the Son of Man and which is for ever laying 
 waste this fair world of our inheritance, God has 
 this rinal word of mercy. When sin had done its 
 worst and its utmost, Mercy held the field. The 
 Cross is the everlasting mercy focussed down to one 
 glorious word of life. 
 
 II. — The Cross the Centre of Fellowship 
 
 It is essentially a sound instinct that has found 
 in the Cross God's reaction to sin, His way of solving 
 the moral problem of the world. 
 
 We may perhaps best realize the nature of God's 
 way of solving the problem of moral evil by con- 
 trasting it with our own. We show in our attitude 
 to crime our characteristic human way of dealing 
 with moral evil. Our method of dealing with crime 
 
u6 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 has in it two elements : judgment and punishment. 
 We first ascertain the fact and assess the measure 
 of the crime ; then we inflict a commensurate punish- 
 ment on the criminal. By this we have secured a 
 certain immunity for society from the activities of 
 that particular criminal, and we have probably 
 deterred a number of poor spirits from like crime. 
 The one thing we have not done is to solve the moral 
 problem involved in crime. For what we have done 
 to the criminal by our present penal methods is 
 either to harden him or to break him. We have 
 either made him a greater menace to society than 
 he was before ; or we have turned him into a shuffling 
 parasite. So far from solving the moral problem, 
 we have only aggravated it ; and this discovery is 
 transforming penology to-day. 
 
 God's method, like ours, begins in judgment, and 
 that is, as we have seen, the first element in the 
 meaning of the Cross. God deals with us on a basis 
 of stark moral realism. He reveals sin to us in its 
 true character, and no man even to this day can 
 look upon the Cross understandingly without realiz- 
 ing that he has been found out. The Cross classifies 
 him — shows him where he stands. " Now is the 
 Judgment of this world," said Jesus. In Jesus, 
 St. Paul tells us, God " declared His righteousness," 
 and over against that unsparing background the sin 
 of the world stands for ever revealed and therefore 
 condemned. 
 
 But after judgment, mercy. That is the final 
 meaning of the Cross. Sin is alienation ; God 
 meets it by reconciliation. His reaction to sin is 
 the gift of forgiveness freely and royally given, 
 
JUDGMENT and MERCY 117 
 
 without money and without price. God's vengeance 
 is forgiveness ; God's revenge is reconciliation. God's 
 punishment is pardon ; this is the intolerable retri- 
 bution of love 
 
 And it is this mercy that overcomes our human 
 contumacy. Shakespeare understood human nature 
 more than most men : 
 
 Your gentleness shall force 
 
 More than your force move us to gentleness. 
 
 We could stand the rod ; what no properly consti- 
 tuted soul can stand, is mercy. It is mercy that 
 breaks us down and brings us to repentance and a 
 changed heart. 
 
 The Cross stands out therefore as the manifes- 
 tation of the divine will to reconciliation, as the 
 symbol and source of a grace which binds man to 
 God in the harmony of willing and loving service. 
 It is centrally the revealing of that will to fellowship 
 which is the deepest thing in the heart of God, and 
 is the ground-plan of the universe. And " as God 
 hath loved us, so ought w T e to love one another." 
 
 So the Cross stands out as the spring and rallying- 
 point of our hopes of a redeemed society. Not by 
 might or by majorities shall we create the world of 
 our dreams, but by the quickening within us and 
 within all men of the grace of social healing and 
 integration at the foot of the Cross. Here is the 
 blood of Jesus which cleanses us from all sin and 
 redeems our life from destruction. For us who 
 with high hope to-day hail the future, our standing 
 ground, our sign, our ruling passion must be the 
 Cross of Christ. In hoc signo, vincemus. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 I. — To the Christian Church 
 
 ON the whole, the Lady Ecclesia has, through- 
 out her history, been more evilly entreated 
 in the house ot her friends than in that of 
 her enemies ; and in these latter days cer- 
 tain of her most devoted servants have done her the 
 ill-service of enticing her into the sterile by-paths 
 of apocalyptic guesswork. Human nature has in it 
 an incorrigible eschatological strain ; and in times of 
 crisis and momentous happening this bias is apt 
 to run amuck with the whole man. Apocalyptic is 
 nothing other than Micawberism turned tragic ; 
 and it does us the infinite harm of habiting the 
 true God in the unreal vestments of a dens ex 
 machina 
 
 Let us acknowledge gratefully the elements of 
 good in the apocalyptic temper. Essentially it is 
 the retort of a religious faith to political pessimism J ; 
 and it is good that we should be reminded at such 
 a time as this, when the schemes of men have gone 
 so tragically " agley," that the last word is still with 
 God. But the man who supposes that God has 
 violent designs upon the historical order is living 
 in a fool's paradise. It is true that He is not tied 
 down to the slow processes of history ; and by His 
 grace it is on due occasion given to man to hustle 
 history. But the divine order is not appointed to 
 drop ready-made from the clouds. 
 
 The essential truth for us in the apocalyptic hope 
 is that the Son of Man is always ready to come into 
 the world with the grace of renewal and uplifting, 
 
 118 
 
EPILOGUE 119 
 
 whensoever there be a prophetic remnant among 
 men ready to receive him. He has come again and 
 again in this way in the course of history, to reinforce 
 mankind in its ceaseless struggle into light and liberty. 
 Once more He may be at the door. Perchance in 
 the present insurgency of the working folk there is 
 a sign of .His coming in power. 
 
 May it not be that His star has already appeared — 
 as before, in the East ? The Russian rising has in 
 it many baffling elements ; but there is some ground 
 for thinking that behind it is a genuine religious 
 impulse. We may not forget that the soil which 
 produced the Russian Revolution raised the one 
 great religious seer of our time, Lyof Tolstoi ; and 
 no soil has been more open to his sowing than that 
 out of which he himself grew. It may be that when 
 the clouds and the dust have been swept away we 
 shall see that Dostoievsky's prediction has come 
 true. Speaking of the ' inmost essence and the 
 ultimate destiny of the Russian nation," he says, 
 " Russia must reveal to the world her own Russian 
 Christ, whom as yet the peoples know not. . . . 
 There lies, I believe, the inmost essence of our vast 
 impending contribution to civilization whereby we 
 shall awaken the European peoples : there lies the 
 inmost core of our exuberant and intense existence 
 that is to be." Perhaps that hour has struck, did 
 we but know it. 
 
 However that may be, we are on the eve of change, 
 a change vast and deep. The wage-earning classes, 
 at last aware of their strength, are rising to claim 
 'their inheritance of life and liberty. " That European 
 sham called civilization " (to quote Dostoievsky 
 
120 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 once more) which has rested upon the subordination 
 of the proletariat, shaken and shattered by the war, 
 is about to receive its coup de grace at the horny 
 hand of insurgent labour. The course of this conflict 
 it is not given to man to predict ; but its final issue 
 is certain, though this generation may not live to 
 see it. The common people are at last coming into 
 their Kingdom. 
 
 The Church of Christ has never been called to 
 make a decision more critical than concerning the 
 part it is to play in this impending change. It has 
 thrown away its right to protest against violence 
 by its benediction of violence in the Great War ; 
 and if it be tempted to essay a quelling of the coming 
 storm by unctuous counsel of moderation, of reason- 
 ableness, of a spirit of conciliation, and the like, it 
 must be ready to have its war-time performances 
 thrown back in its teeth. For obviously it cannot 
 bless violence against the Hun and damn violence 
 against the predatory capitalist. However, let us 
 hope (as we justly may) that the coming revolution 
 may run its course without the need of this perilous 
 counsel. 
 
 The real danger of the Church is that this tide 
 of life may sweep past without touching it, and leave 
 it stranded high and dry. I speak, of course, of the 
 organized Church ; for the true Church is always at 
 the heart of life. A writer commenting upon the 
 formation of a New Labour Party in England 
 daringly quoted the Scripture : "A Body hast Thou 
 prepared for Me." Perhaps he was right. In which 
 case, so much the worse for the Church. Yet we 
 may not forget that the Church has been entrusted 
 
EPILOGUE 121 
 
 with the one word which may make all the difference 
 to the social revolution between being a hard and 
 bitter struggle and a splendid crusade for the creation 
 of a living society. It holds the real key to this 
 crisis — if it can but find the means of using it 
 
 Perhaps the most significant phenomenon in the 
 course of the Welsh Revival was the ferment of 
 reconciliation which accompanied it. Old feuds 
 were composed ; old hatchets buried. It was a 
 season of social healing and renewal. This was as 
 it should be ; its only failure was that it did not 
 go deep enough and far enough. But it was a real 
 suggestion of the appointed social reaction of a 
 vision of the Kingdom of God ; and it is a hint from 
 which the Church may gain much light on its task 
 to-day. For the solvent of feuds among Rhondda 
 colliers is no less the solvent of class antagonisms. 
 It is only a vision of the Kingdom of God that can 
 avert the danger of a disastrous class-war. 
 
 This vision it is the office of the Church to com- 
 municate ; and because the vision hangs on a change 
 of heart, it is the immediate task of the Church to 
 bid all men — of whatever ciass or station — to repent. 
 And if the preacher be silenced by the inertia of the 
 comfortable and the orthodox, then it is a matter 
 of life and death to him that he carry this prophetic 
 word out into the open world. And it is not at all 
 unlikely that if he give to this word its full content, 
 he may presently find himself crying in the wilder- 
 ness — yet not to shrubs and stones, for the people 
 will flock to him as they did to the prophet by Jordan 
 long ago. The truth is that there must be a revo- 
 lution in the Church itself if it is to save and hallow 
 
122 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 the revolution in the commonwealth. First of all 
 and most of all, it must recover the prophetic note 
 and utter it — at whatever cost to its external fabric. 
 The present organization of the Church belongs to 
 a day already dead ; and now as ever the new wine 
 may burst the old wine-skins. But what does that 
 matter, if only the Church can speak the word that 
 the hour needs ? 
 
 And surely the hour itself is telling us what that 
 word must be. " Our task," said Lamennais, " is 
 the creation of peoples " ; and to this end, the Church 
 must go to man with its living word, clean purged 
 of the banalities of a cheap and easy Salvationist on 
 the one hand, and of the genial futilities of a culture- 
 Gospel on the other, by being centred upon a Kingdom 
 of God, whose ground-plan is the Cross, whose door is 
 conversion, whose law is fellowship, with an evangelism 
 which will send men binding their brethren to them- 
 selves in the unity of a life-giving and redeeming fellow- 
 ship with the same eagerness and haste as in times 
 past they have fled from the wrath to come. 
 
 To this word, men's hearts will rise eagerly and 
 gladly ; and in such a tide of spiritual renewal, 
 may we not justly discern the coming of the Son 
 of Man ? These are dark and desolate days, but 
 such days are the characteristic background of the 
 historical comings of the Son of Man in power. The 
 anguish that men have suffered, the insolvency of 
 man-made policies, the relapse of civilized peoples 
 into barbarism, the broken hearts and the desolated 
 homes of a continent — these things are creating a 
 "famine of the hearing of the word of the Lord." 
 This wide need surely presages one of the days of 
 
EPILOGUE 123 
 
 the Son of Man ; but will His people be willing in 
 the day of His power ? 
 
 When the nations lie in blood, and their Kings a broken 
 
 brood, 
 Look up, O most sorrowful of daughters ; 
 Lift up thy head and hark what sounds are in the breeze, 
 For His feet are coming to thee on the waters ! 
 
 Truly the Bridegroom cometh. But what of the 
 Bride ? Will she be ready ? Is she going to live 
 in her past, swathing her mind in her traditions and 
 feeding her heart upon her memories, going about 
 obsolete tasks in a world that has forged ahead into 
 a new life in which she has no share ? Or will she 
 give herself to take her place in the coming advance, 
 marching in the van of the great host that is going 
 in to possess the promised land of larger life and 
 wider liberty t 
 
 II. — To the People 
 
 Your day at last has come ; and amid the bloody 
 desolation of this time, the one cheering sign is the 
 awakening of the people. The dark days in which 
 you and your children could be exploited for the 
 profit and the pleasure of the few, and be led like 
 lambs to the slaughter to gratify the vanity of kings 
 or to further the ends of selfish statecraft — those 
 days are over. You are about to take the affairs 
 of the world into your hands. Milton, in one of his 
 great passages, describes England as " a noble and 
 puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man 
 
124 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 after sleep and shaking her invincible locks " ; and 
 a man who looks abroad upon the world with some 
 imagination to-day may see such another picture 
 in the rising of the working-classes. You know 
 your power at last ; and you are preparing to 
 use it. 
 
 But may one whose heart beats with yours in 
 hope and expectation propound to you the question : 
 This power, how are you going to use it ? You are 
 going to recast the existing order ; but what kind 
 of order are you going to set up instead ? 
 
 Broadly there are two alternatives before you 
 
 The first is the class-war, which can only end in 
 the institution of a new class-ascendancy. If you 
 want to become top-dogs, you can easily do so. 
 But what you have to bear in mind is that if you 
 only effect a revolution within the existing political 
 and social framework, you are not extirpating the 
 evil thing which has been the cause of your miseries. 
 You are leaving it where it will still grow its dismal 
 fruit of social disintegration. You will have on 
 your hands a society in which the old leprosy is still 
 active ; and the co-operative commonwealth of your 
 dreams will be as far away as ever. You may destroy 
 capitalism ; but that is only to remove the symptom. 
 You have not eradicated the disease. And if you 
 leave the disease, it will in time create another anti- 
 social monster under which your children's children 
 may be groaning more loudly than you have groaned 
 under the burden of capitalism. 
 
 The alternative to the class- war is more difficult 
 to state. But I return to Lamennais's phrase — 
 " the creation of peoples." " We must," said that 
 
EPILOGUE 125 
 
 prophet on another occasion, *' lay in advance the 
 foundations of a new society." A class-war can effect 
 no more than a change of clothing ; what we need 
 to set before us is the creation of a new body. 
 
 So far as I understand the Labour Movement, 
 this positive ideal is already implicit in its programme. 
 Its international outlook shows that it has over- 
 leaped the old sundering walls of nationality. For 
 the awakened worker, the race line is rapidly dis- 
 appearing. But the impulse of fellowship which is 
 creating this international solidarity is, I believe, 
 too strong to be stopped at this achievement. It 
 is bound in its stride to overleap the class line no 
 less decisively. The outstanding symbol of class 
 division in the modern world is capitalism ; and the 
 onslaught upon the capitalistic system while it may 
 be chiefly actuated by resentment and hostility is 
 inherently a step in the direction of a unified social 
 order. The great thing is that it should be con- 
 ceived and thought of in that generous light — not 
 as the bone of contention between top-dogs and 
 under-dogs, but as an anti-social phenomenon which 
 deprives both top-dog and under-dog of their in- 
 heritance of real life. The abolition of capitalism 
 is as necessary to the rich as to the poor. For is 
 it not written that they who have riches can only 
 with difficulty enter the Kingdom of Heaven ? It 
 is a question not of our attitude to a system but to 
 men. Let us hate the system deeply and invincibly ; 
 let us assault the dividing wall with an implacable 
 energy ; but let us remember that the people on 
 the other side of the wall are — men. And our busi- 
 ness is to create a society which will not be complete 
 
126 The RED CAP on THE CROSS 
 
 or healthy except as these others enter it on the 
 same term as ourselves. 
 
 What we must have is a profound reverence for 
 manhood, expressing itself in an indomitable will 
 to fellowship. It is not at all to the point to say 
 that the privileged classes will not see the matter 
 in the same light as we do, or that in the past they 
 have not treated common folk on this plane of 
 reverence and fellowship. That may be true ; but 
 it does not alter our obligation to them. Even if 
 they treat us as enemies, we must treat them as 
 friends and brothers. And that will be the real 
 test of the moral quality of the revolution. If it 
 be charged with such a temper as this, it possesses 
 the abiding foundations of a mighty society. It 
 will carry the sign of the Cross, it w T ill be four-square 
 with the plan of the Universe ; it will bear the image 
 and the superscription of God. 
 
 In first intention the social revolution is a means 
 of economic emancipation. But we shall not allow 
 ourselves to forget that liberty standing alone is 
 never safe or full. With liberty there must go 
 a deep social passion. For the single watchword 
 Freedom, we must, as I have already said, substi- 
 tute the double watchword — Freedom and Fellowship ; 
 and remember that the will to fellowship must be 
 true to itself through everything — so true to itself 
 that it will count no man an enemy to be defeated, 
 but a brother to be won ; and will go forth with an 
 unconquerable patience to create a society in which 
 there shall be no rancour or hate or self-seeking, no 
 bitterness ot partisanship or any other divisive 
 thing, but a great and willing co-operation in the 
 
EPILOGUE 127 
 
 making of men and in the enrichment of life. To 
 set out in this spirit is truly to nail the Red Cap to 
 the Cross. 
 
 William Blake saw afar off the building of Jeru- 
 salem " in England's green and pleasant land/' but 
 the Jerusalem of his vision is truly as wide as the 
 world : 
 
 The stones are pity, and the bricks well-wrought affections, 
 Enamel'd with love and kindness, and the tiles engraven 
 
 gold- 
 Labour of merciful hands ; the beams and rafters are for- 
 giveness ; 
 The mortar and the cement of the work, tears of honesty, 
 the nails 
 
 And the screws and iron braces, are well-wrought blandish- 
 ments, 
 And well-contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten, 
 Always comforting the remembrance ; the floors humility ; 
 The ceilings, devotion ; the hearts thanksgiving ; 
 
 • » • • • 
 
 Go on, build as in hope. 
 
 And it is with some such vision as this before us 
 that we shall lay truly and well the foundations 
 of that Kingdom of Man which is none other than 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
Printed in Great Britain by 
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY