All Things Considered
When next I meet a rich man I intend to walk up to him in the street
and address him with Oriental hyperbole. He will probably run away.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor
in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or
ourself. It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to
a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of
health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that,
obviously, it is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple
addition: it is either infallible or it is false. To mix science up
with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its
ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. I want
my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me.
It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be
killed. I apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is,
that I have just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of
highly intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these
truisms in their lives.
Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally
reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him “brilliant;”
which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of
contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too
much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a
shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon
imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that
everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just
been reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a
number of men for whom I have a high respect, and called “New Theology
and Applied Religion.” And it is literally true that I have read
through whole columns of the things without knowing what the people
were talking about. Either they must be talking about some black and
bestial religion in which they were brought up, and of which I never
even heard, or else they must be talking about some blazing and
blinding vision of God which they have found, which I have never found,
and which by its very splendour confuses their logic and confounds
their speech. But the best instance I can quote of the thing is in
connection with this matter of the business of physical science on the
earth, of which I have just spoken. The following words are written
over the signature of a man whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot
make head or tail of them—
“When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a
historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary,
the story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite
plain that the Pauline scheme—I mean the argumentative processes of
Paul’s scheme of salvation—had lost its very foundation; for was not
that foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from
their first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total
depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the
superstructure followed.”
It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean
something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that
man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do
not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of
depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?
What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a
fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages
would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a
slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is
simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in
themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said
that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls,
one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent
with everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have
grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in
no way have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science
(not being raving lunatics) never said that there had been “an
incessant rise in the scale of being;” for an incessant rise would mean
a rise without any relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full
of relapse and failure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there
may have been any number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am
honestly bewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in
which the advanced person writes that because geologists know nothing
about the Fall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because
science has not found something which obviously it could not find,
therefore something entirely different—the psychological sense of
evil—is untrue. You might sum up this writer’s argument abruptly, but
accurately, in some way like this—“We have not dug up the bones of the
Archangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, left
to themselves, will not be selfish.” To me it is all wild and whirling;
as if a man said—“The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so
I suppose that my wife does love me.”
I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or
into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer
calls the doctrine of depravity. But whatever else the worst doctrine
of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction;
it had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind
wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I
cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him
that his ancestors once had tails. Man’s primary purity and innocence
may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only
thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we
have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word,
more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by
the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing
as the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is
something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is
something that one cannot help finding.
Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man
says, “I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally
from fermented liquor,” I quite understand what he means, and how his
view could be defended. If a man says, “I wish to abolish beer because
I am a temperance man,” his remark conveys no meaning to my mind. It is
like saying, “I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker.”
If a man says, “I am not a Trinitarian,” I understand. But if he says
(as a lady once said to me), “I believe in the Holy Ghost in a
spiritual sense,” I go away dazed. In what other sense could one
believe in the Holy Ghost? And I am sorry to say that this pamphlet of
progressive religious views is full of baffling observations of that
kind. What can people mean when they say that science has disturbed
their view of sin? What sort of view of sin can they have had before
science disturbed it? Did they think that it was something to eat? When
people say that science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do
they mean? Did they think that immortality was a gas?
Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new
principle into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end
of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an
Atheist from the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the
face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man
who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is
Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has
believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why
our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of
all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that
they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My
chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they
are not at all revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do
not shake religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only
answer the great paradox by repeating the truism.
THE METHUSELAHITE
I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining
and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at
Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I
suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an
inquiry about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial
gravity the man wrote down the word “Methuselahite.” Whoever looks over
such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his
time; unless the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist
knowledge he could not “place” Methuselahism among what Bossuet called
the variations of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the
tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it
meant. The soldier replied that it was his religion “to live as long as
he could.”
Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that
answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of
quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious
problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some
new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the
whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as
or wise as that word “Methuselahite.” The whole meaning of literature
is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of
philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul
of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought,
like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the
paganism of to-day.
Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new
religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the
way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be
able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will
begin, “The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in
Nature....” “Methuselahite,” I shall say sharply; “good morning.”
“Human Life,” another will say, “Human Life, the only ultimate
sanctity, freed from creed and dogma....” “Methuselahite!” I shall
yell. “Out you go!” “My religion is the Religion of Joy,” a third will
explain (a bald old man with a cough and tinted glasses), “the Religion
of Physical Pride and Rapture, and my....” “Methuselahite!” I shall cry
again, and I shall slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall
down. Then a pale young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to
me (as one did only the other day): “Moods and impressions are the only
realities, and these are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly
therefore define my religion....” “I can,” I should say, somewhat
sternly. “Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a
moment longer you won’t fulfil it.”
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old
vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it
masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls