IV

SOCIAL PROBLEMS: SELF-SACRIFICE, OR REVOLUTION?

FRIENDS: Some of you may think, in looking at the title of my lecture for tonight, that it forms rather a descent from the subjects that we have been considering on previous occasions. We turn from the study of a World-Religion, from the contemplation of a World-Teacher, to plunge into the social problems of our time, and to ask whether they shall be solved by self­-sacrifice or revolution. And yet, rightly looked at, the subject of human needs and human difficulties should properly follow on the con­sideration of those loftier topics with which, so far, we have been concerned; for the rapture of the Mystic in the Beatific Vision does not really work out its due results unless he brings some of the beauty and the harmony which have delighted him into the jangle and the noises of our earthly life. That keen air of the mountains, delicious as it is, should not in­capacitate us, but rather invigorate us for the [74] meeting of human troubles, for the healing of human woes. And when the World-Teacher is amongst us to spread the wisdom of His teachings and to shed abroad His love, surely part of H is work will be to lay the foundation of that Kingdom of Righteousness, which His followers shall have the task of slowly building upon earth. And so I do not think our subject tonight should really be considered a descent, but as the natural and rightful subject towards which we should now turn, in order that we may try to understand how we may help our brethren, and in the very act of helping may prepare the way for the coming of the Lord.

Now, those of you who have read the news­papers of the last fortnight and have looked at them with intelligence awake and bent on the larger outlines of what you see there - even perchance if you read carelessly - you must have been struck with the three special subjects which occupied the columns on the first page of the newspapers, and struck you by their juxta­position side by side. One of these would deal with the great pageants of the last days, with all that accompanied the crowning of the King and Queen. Next to that you will have noticed day after day accounts of the strikes that are going on amid the workmen of the North, the struggles there between labour and capital, the bitter strife which is rending and threatening industry. And then, after those two - the splendour of the civilisation and the [75] strife which mars the splendour - you will have seen almost invariably, I think, a column devoted to the latest triumphs of aviation, the flights of men in the air, the races over land and sea.

Now, of those three subjects thus steadily reproduced side by side each has its significance, its instruction for us tonight, for together they give us a vision of the civilisation of our day, of the forces at work amongst us, of the ten­dency of the civilisation of which we are a part; and I take the three as an opening in order to see in these the conditions that surround us, in order to look at the factors of our problems, that we may be able to judge of the solution which it may be possible to find.

I pause for a moment on the first of these that has occupied so much of thought and attention during the last days - the many pageants, processions, spectacles, which have accompanied the crowning of our Rulers.

Looking at the crowds that took part in all of those, trying to catch what was for them the attraction and the pleasure, we ask: What are the points that come most clearly out of those dense, serried ranks of men and women? Clearly part of it was enjoyment of the spectacle as spectacle, the enjoyment of seeing something bright and brilliant that changed for a moment the dull and sluggish current of their daily life, the pleasure in the mere sight, the beauty, the splendour; a change from the dull London streets, from the [76] grey, cheerless houses of so many millions of the population; a pleasure bright, although passing, in for a moment catching a glimpse of a life so far removed from their own. And then, after that natural pleasure, you could distinguish a certain pride amongst the people of the greatness of the panorama of Empire that was unrolled before their eyes as the long processions passed through street after street. You could notice how the warmest welcome went out towards the great constituents of that Empire - the men who represent the Colonies, those who represent the great Indian Empire; there you had the two groups that most typified for the crowd the greatness of their country, the power and might of the Empire that stretches round the world. And then the third factor: a real, fairly strong, affection for the two royal figures round whom the whole splendour was centring. No one who looked at those crowds with the eye that sees beyond the physical could but notice the great crimson clouds that rolled out as the procession passed, and enwrapped the royal pair, almost hiding them in the depth and beauty of their colour. And those who know aught of those colours that mark the emotions know that those crimson clouds meant a real love, a real affection, for the crowned man and woman who were driving through the streets. And some, per­chance, who might have seen the great proces­sions in which Queen Victoria took part - her Diamond Jubilee, for instance - would have [77] noticed a difference in the greeting, marked by the difference in the colour whereof I speak; for round that venerable lady, who so long had wielded the sceptre of the Empire, there rolled out a feeling that was almost more devotion than love - love raised to a very high point, love that was full of devotion to her person, of reverence for her as Queen - whereas the other day there was less of the exquisite blue that shows devotion tinged with worship, and more of the natural human feeling of love and sym­pathy for these, almost as yet untried, round whom the nation’s heart is swiftly beginning to cling. And that part of the pageant was of the profoundest interest, for this love is one of the great conservative forces in the nation. I do not mean Conservative in the political sense as party, but conservative in the human sense of constructing, maintaining, and upbuilding; for the love and loyalty of a nation to its Chief is one of the mighty forces which bind an Empire together, and in that love to the Crown, raised above all party struggle, there is the promise of the endurance of the Empire, of the strength that will hold it firm, no matter what the difficulties in front of it may be.

But now from one here and there, sometimes spoken, sometimes only felt, questions have arisen as regards the value of those pageants. Is it not a great waste of money? is one reflection that one has seen now and again in [78] reckoning up the cost in money which obviously was involved in the spectacle. Covent Garden Opera-House filled with roses may naturally, in the minds of some, gleam doubtfully when it is placed side by side with hungry men, women, and children, living in the same city where the splendid spectacle is seen. And yet that human feeling, natural as it is, seems to me to have in it something of error, something of short­sightedness, for the using for the poor the pounds spent upon the spectacle would only for a moment lift the burden of hunger from masses of miserable people, whereas the emo­tion of love and loyalty that is evoked in the heart of the nation is priceless beyond all reckoning. And when you have a nation like our own, you can see far worse ways in which money is wasted than in showing a nation’s joy over the crowning of its King. You might have many a coronation for the drink bill which is paid year by year - a drink bill that means beaten wives and tortured children and wrecked homes and ruined strength; and I don’t think it lies in the mouth of a nation that wastes millions on strong drink to complain of the expenditure incurred during the last few days. And when to that you add the millions spent on war - think how you build war-vessel after war-vessel to outrace in the costly game other nations whom you dread - when you reckon the light hearts with which you waste your millions for the possible destruction of human [79] life, then I rather challenge the reality of com­plaint against the cost of those pageants.

But it is said they were too military - too many soldiers, too much of uniform and glitter. But that is your own fault. You have made the common life so ugly that you can only find beauty and splendour when you turn to your Court, your Army, and your Navy. Even the Church itself - though on an occasion like this it adds its quota of splendour and of beaut­ies still largely under the influence of the Early Victorian and Mid-Victorian age, when everything that was ugly was thought to be spiritual, and all that was beautiful was regarded as tending towards the worship of the devil. And so you must not blame, for if we are to have beauty at all we can only have it where beauty has been allowed to remain. Beauty, ceremonial order, those are now restricted to the Court, to the Church, to the Army, and to the Navy. Common life has been made ugly, common dress has been made hideous. How could you build a pageant out of figures in top-­hat and morning coat and trousers? There is no material for beauty in the common life. You must have historical pageants in order to see how gracious and how beautiful may be the common life of man. You must go back to the time of Elizabeth, back to the time of the Charleses, and then you see beauty and grace and colour in the ordinary life of the common people as well as in that of the middle [80] classes; but in this civilisation of ours we have thrown aside the beautiful and exhibited the ugly, so that naturally when we want grace and beauty we must go to the Services, which alone have provided and kept it in our midst. And I know in my own eyes the pleasure with which, after seeing the great crowd - grey, dull, ugly in colour and in appearance - I saw the First Lord of the Admiralty come walking along with his gold-laced coat and his cocked hat. It was quite a pleasure to see a man in clothes that were not repulsive and ugly. And if you want to change the military aspect of your pageants, then learn to bring beauty into the home and the common life, and do not think it is practical to be ugly, and that all that is of beauty is simply dreamy and superfluous.

Turning from that, glance for a moment at my second column, the column devoted to the record of the lamentable strikes going on to­day. The saddest part of those is to see how crime is accompanying them; acts of incendiarism, deliberate firing of ships, five deliberate fires breaking out in one single liner of a great steamship company. Injury to those who are not even immediately concerned in this war between capital and labour is becoming a more and more lamentable and common incident in our days, and it is that partly which points to the possibility of revolution when only hatred is felt and longing for revenge occupies the human heart. You see it more in France than [81] you do over here, because still in France you have some of the spirit which made the revolu­tion of the past; and there you see a railway partly torn up because the railway employees are discontented, and the danger to hundreds of innocent lives, because this may count for something in terrorising those whom the strikers desire to vanquish in the struggle. I have heard it said that that is always the case in war, the innocent must suffer as well as the guilty, and this is war. But what does that mean? It means there is so little strength in our civilisa­tion that class is set against class in war all but in name; when the strikers take advantage of the public need, when they strike at the moment when they think most public inconvenience will be caused, then you are face to face with a social condition which only in name is removed from civil war. The sense of responsibility, the sense of public duty, of the place of each citizen in the social order, and of his duty to the State - these are largely absent, are passing away from the masses of our workers, passing away from those also who are higher m the social scale. And when the sense of duty to the nation falls into the background, where shall there be the shield from the possibility of civil war or of revolution?

Pass to the third column. I only allude to it as a mark of the progress of science, so marvellous in her conquest over nature during the nineteenth century and the twentieth, the [82] powers that science has found herself able to harness, applying her knowledge to the conquest of nature in order to enrich and make easier the life of man. Look back over the past and compare it with the present, and that one point is the point that comes out most strongly, and is really one of the factors which make inevitable a mighty social change; for this is the age of machinery, of power applied to every form of human production and of human labour. The introduction of applied science into industry has revolutionised industry, has changed all its conditions, and has enormously multiplied the power of production. Where once the handicraft flourished, now the rattle of the machine is heard; where once the artisan laboured with his hands, now the machine takes his place, and he is only wanted to guide it; and even that guidance is diminishing more and more as machines become more and more per­fect. And not only is industry being revolu­tionised, but all human communications are undergoing the same change, slower methods giving way to more rapid methods, life to varieties of machine. Looking at our London streets we can see the revolution in progress, horses disappearing everywhere and motors taking their place. On the sea steam is likely to be displaced in its turn by the power of electricity; similarly, in the very air we find man is making his way. In the household the same thing is beginning to appear: carpets swept [83] by machinery, bread kneaded by machinery. More and more the machine is taking the place of human labour.

Ask yourself what that ought to mean, and then inquire what it does mean in solid and actual fact. What it ought to mean is clear. Increased production should mean increased comfort for the whole of the commonwealth; it should mean longer education, so that boys and girls might complete their education, their work no longer needed where the machine has multiplied man’s power to produce; it should mean the cessation of child labour, of boy and girl labour, and education should be their work instead of production; it should mean less struggle in every part of industry, increased leisure to the worker, who can produce fifty times as much in an hour of his labour as he could two centuries ago; it should mean that the leisure which is now the appanage of a class should be spread over the whole of the people, with all the immense benefits and pleasures which grow out of adequate leisure. I do not mean idleness, for man takes joy in work when the work is congenial and not over-laborious. In general, idleness is as wearisome as unending labour. But leisure, the leisure that recruits the strength, that gives time for the cultivation of literature and the enjoyment of art - oh, surely that should have been a gift brought in the hands of applied science to our people; and the people at large should have been the [84] happier because science had learned to utilise the mighty forces of nature. Machinery should gradually do all the unpleasant work of the community, should hew the coal in the mine instead of men, who burrow there like moles underground; machinery should take the place of the pit ponies, tortured continually in their miserable toil. Machinery that does not feel, that has no senses through which it can suffer, should bear the burden of all forms of labour which are toilsome, unpleasant, and degrading. That is what machinery should do for a people.

But what has it done? It has piled up vast fortunes for the few, and left the worker sadder in many ways than he was before. It has poisoned our air, poisoned our water, crowded our people together in the miserable, gloomy streets of a Sheffield, of a Bradford, of a Leeds, cramping their lives; undermining their health, diminishing their vitality. While it has brought wealth to the few it has brought diminution of life to the many. I am not forgetting that it has made products cheaper and commoner, but very often at the cost of their value both in material and in beauty. And it might have been wholly a blessing where it has so largely become a curse.

Now why? Why should that be? From the lack of the sense of responsibility and of public duty that I alluded to just now in the case of those strikers, who are willing to take criminal action and injure the public good in [85] their struggle with their employers. Indiffer­ence, irresponsibility, are more blameworthy in the educated and in the wealthy than in the ignorant and in the poor. And that lack of responsibility began above and has gone down like a poison through all parts of the body poli­tic; for the sense of duty, public duty, is divorced from rank and power and wealth in this civilisa­tion as it has never been before in any civilisa­tion that we know in history. And there lies the danger, there lies the menace of tomorrow, lest the loss of the sense of public duty in the various ranks of the community should make possible a violent uprising with all the inevitable misery that would follow in its wake. And it is because of that that the sense of public duty must be revived, that men must understand again that with wealth and rank and power goes duty to the community, to the country. And until that sense revives in England - and there are signs of its revival - there will always be a danger between the class unfairly rich and huge masses unfairly and most miserably poor.

I used a phrase that some of you may be in­clined to challenge - that in the present civilisa­tion the sense of duty was more divorced from wealth and rank than in any previous civilisation that you may meet in history. Let me for a moment attempt to justify that by referring to two of the great systems which still may be studied, for they are sufficiently recent to bring them within what is called the historic period. [86] Take the civilisation of India as it existed some four or five thousand years ago, not to go further back into the past. It has fallen into ruins now, but still the value of its central ideas remains. It was called, and is called still, the system of castes. Now, what was that in its inception and its working for many a thousand years? Highest in the community was a great class of men, poor in all the world’s wealth, but distinguished by their learning - the class of Brahmanas. They, by hereditary duty, were bound to study, deeply, profoundly, during all the years of boyhood and of youth, and then it became their duty in manhood to be the teachers of the people, without reward, without payment, bound to give to any boy that came to them the learning that he asked for, the education that he craved. Poor, supported mainly out of the charity of the people, but honoured by the people as none other caste was honoured; though he were clothed in but a couple of cotton cloths, Kings would rise from their thrones and bow at the feet of the Brahmana; honour was given to him instead of wealth, and duty was expected from him, duty to the people.

Then you came to the ruling class, second, not first, in the land, for learning was the test of social greatness, and not either power or wealth. The ruling class, strong and splendid the King, those who administered the laws, the soldiers who defended the nation, the police who preserved internal order; those were the [87] members of the second great caste in the State. And then the organisers of industry, the bankers, the merchants, whose duty was the gathering of wealth, but the gathering, not the hoarding, the gathering in order that it might be used. And that was the caste on which fell the real burden of the nation. Great wealth accumulated in order to be spent in the help­ing and the succouring of the people, building temples for the nation’s worship, supporting Brahmanas for the nation’s teaching, building rest-houses by the side of the road for the passing traveller, digging wells where water could be given to all, planting trees that the roads might be shaded from the sun, building and supporting hospitals alike for men and animals; those were the great duties of charity imposed by the law and public opinion on the merchant caste.

Then below them the great caste of the artificers, the artisans, the agricultural labourers, to be regarded, it is said in the Law, as the younger children in the household, whose duty was service, whose reward was comfort and protection. That system is now in ruins. Why? Because the highest forgot their duty. That is for the most part the answer which comes to the question as to why a nation fell. Those who ought to have been poor and learned grasped at the wealth of the world, and used their power to enrich themselves instead of to serve; made their caste a narrow trade [88] union, as it were, from which all others were excluded, whereas in the earlier days a man might enter it if he showed the qualities which justified the entry. And so, step by step, the civilisation descended, until from these great days in which it is written in their history that there was not a man who did not know how to read and write, you come down to the present condition of ignorance and degradation. And yet, even in its ruins, even with all its faults, even after a millennium of conquest, the Indian population, the labourers, the hand workers, are a much happier population than the same class of people here. Their faces are brighter; their lives are gladder; they have beauty in their homes, beauty in their clothes and their surroundings; they are refined and gentle; they behave as you only find people of gentle birth behave here - with a courtesy and gentleness belonging here only to the highly trained, but there to the masses of the people. You meet them after their work is over, smiling, singing, bright and gay; and, except in the times when famine sweeps over the land, they are a happy, a contented, and a sober population. So admir­able even in its ruins is that great social system of India.

Pass from that to the feudal system of Europe. There you had a feudal nobility who paid in service for the rank and power that they held. All the older families of nobles held their land on military tenure; to defend [89] the people was their duty, and in exchange for that they held the land; no taxes for army, no taxes for navy, no taxes for fortifications along the nation’s borders; the whole of that fell upon the highly placed, whose service in return for privilege was to risk their lives and limbs. They called it Merrie England in those days. You would not call it Merrie England now.

Oh, you say, there were many abuses. Yes, there were; but the masses of the people were happier than they are in the present day; their lives brighter, gayer, more joyful than they are in our twentieth-century civilisation; divisions between classes less marked, communion be­tween classes very much freer; because it was a system, not an anarchy, as is the so-called civilisation of our own days. And there you come to a point of vast importance. An order, even if it be not a perfect order, is better for man than disorder and absence of organisation. In the one he grows; in the other he decays. And there lies the danger of our modern life. Because of those facts of the past, I used the phrase that never before in history had we seen rank and wealth so divorced from public duty as they are today. And there lies the evil that demands a remedy; there lies the possi­bility which still is open in our English land. For look for a moment how things are going now - the endeavour is being made, ill or well conceived, according to your party views, to take from one class and to give to another; [90] but taking by force, even if it be the force of a majority, can never make a settled social peace.

Oh, you say, but let us get rid of the House of Lords, and then we shall be better off. And you forget, in the appealing to popular passion, that only part of your House of Lords sits there because they are sons of their fathers; and that you have gathered in that House representatives of literature, of art, of science, given the outer title because of the inner nobility. You forget that the men who made your Empire are there, and that when a man stands out above his fellows it is to that House that the Crown sends him, to add his knowledge and his experience to the treasury of the permanent Council of the nation. Do as you will, for yours is the power; but remember that counting heads without weighing them is not always the way to the building of a mighty Empire.

And, after all, what can you do? What is one of the great reforms that has made one of your statesmen apparently almost a hero in England? - old-age pensions. I do not deny that it is better to have that than to have the condition that preceded the granting; but, after all, if you clear your mind of the prejudice which imagines that the masses of the people must always be poor, are a few shillings a week to keep a man out of the workhouse a fair return from a nation for the strength of his youth, the industry of his manhood, the drudgery through which his life has been passed year after year [91] in struggle and in toil? Is that England’s only recognition of her workers, to give them a few shillings out of the vast wealth they have produced? Oh, not in that way by small reforms wrung out by the exigencies of party strife, will you build up the nation that should be a model of civilisation in the world. Not by struggles in Parliament, but by a development of con­science among the people, must come the great changes that are necessary to make this Empire what it should be, what perchance it yet shall be, among the nations of the world.

But you may say: If you would not have alterations made by a mere attack on privilege, by a tax here and a tax there, how do you pro­pose to make the changes that all admit are needed? By the self-sacrifice of those who have, and not by the revolution and the up­rising of those who have not.

Revolution can destroy; it cannot build. The ignorant can rise up; they cannot construct. Not by the starving and the miserable can a social order be established wherein all shall live in peace and happiness, wherein all shall share leisure and the beauty and grace of life. And if I would plead for that self-sacrifice today, it is because to me there are certain priceless things that exist in this nation that a revolution would destroy and bring to naught the accumulated results and the habits of cen­turies, the dignity, the grace, the sense of beauty that make life human, and not a mere [92] struggle between contending savages. Those things, which now belong only to a class, should be spread over the whole of the nation. Not to pull down those who are higher, but to lift up those who are lower, that should be our aim. It is so easy to destroy, so difficult to make again. And the France of today should mark for you the losses which grow out of the violence of a revolution made by reforms too long delayed.

Now, what might be done if the highly placed, the wealthy, and the powerful in social life made up their minds that their position demands from them self-sacrifice, and not mere idle luxury and self-indulgence? In the first place, the stronger brains amongst them should, in the leisure of their guarded lives, think out some reasonable plan of social order which might take the place of the disorder of the pre­sent - an order based on reason and on facts, an order to which they could bring their know­ledge of the world and their experience of practical life. For what is wanted today is that a new social order should be thought out, not fought out - made by thinking, and not made by struggle either in Parliament or in the streets. For the politician lives from hand to mouth. What else can he do while party government is the rule in our country? He must get the better of his opponents; he must deny to-day in Opposition what tomorrow in Government he will affirm. It is the play [93] backwards and forwards of parties that we see, while we need a scheme for the building of a nation. Strong brains, then, in the classes that have leisure - there lies their first great task.

And when you turn then to the holders of fortunes, huge, vast, accumulated out of the labour of millions, what is their duty in the struggle of our times? You see the beginning of that in the great organisations that have been built up in America. And some of you will remember that two years ago, speaking of the coming changes, I pointed to the likelihood that that very extreme of competition embodied in what is called the Trusts would bring about its own remedy, and result ultimately in a fairer and happier state of things. And what is happening now in America? The head of the largest of those Trusts, the great Steel and Iron Cor­poration, is advising the Government of America to appoint a Department of Industry, and to vest in a Minister of Industry the con­trol of the vast organisation that he now rules, bringing it under a State Department, and no longer leaving it a monopoly of a few men gathering enormous fortunes; he argues that a nation cannot always go on by the wasteful way of competition, now that the Trusts have shown how much more economically it is possible to organise industry. And he suggests that the nation should do it instead of the company; that it should be a national organisation, [94] and not a monopoly inimical to the State. And so the first great step is being taken to change the tyranny of individuals into a national or­ganisation which shall regulate the industry for the benefit of all, and put an end to strikes by co-operation and economical organisation. There is one step along the right lines to which men of great fortune should address them­selves.

Then comes the question of education. The duty of those who have taken wealth from the nation at large is to give it back in the form of education for the masses of the people who have made those fortunes possible; that also is beginning in America, vast endowments giving back to the people that which has been drawn from their labour. And here in England, only the day before yesterday, I saw how four wealthy people had just given an endowment of two hundred thousand pounds to build up the college at Reading to the status of a university. Oh, if that spirit spreads, if men use wealth for educating instead of in idle luxury, then the beginning of true self-sacrifice is seen, and shall prevent revolution; for men give instead of waiting to have things taken from them, and hold out their hands full of gifts instead of waiting till their riches shall be torn from them by law.

Another thing that great fortunes can do in the hands of large manufacturers is what one or two have done already - to make conditions [95] better for the workers than they are, for the most part, today; they should build everywhere garden cities where the workers may live, away in the country, and may recruit the energies which they have exhausted in the labour of the day; where games may be ready for them, where fields may stretch around them, where the theatre may give them drama, where the hall may give them lecture or concert. There, again, is a line along which great fortunes may be sacrificed to the common good, to reap a vaster fortune in love and gratitude, and in the greater stability of the nation to which they belong.

And just as we see that great brains at leisure may work out intellectually the problems, that great fortunes accumulated may be spent along the lines that the thinkers have devised, so does it come as a personal duty to every young man and woman in the leisured class to find some useful work to which they shall turn their hands, to justify their existence by being the unpaid workers of the nation. I am not ignoring the fact that many are doing it already; I am not forgetting that the social conscience is growing among the classes to which I refer; but I do declare here that no one - no man or woman, strong, healthy, with hours of leisure on their hands - but should give some of those hours to unpaid work among less fortunate individuals, should share among them the refinement and the culture which become a cancer unless given to the people, and injure [96] rather than uphold. Oh, there is not one amongst them that could not add something of greater happiness to the crowded masses of our poor. They might open free theatres, where noble drama could be played; they might have free concert halls, where good music should be given - I do not mean such scientific music as the untrained people at first could not under­stand, but music that should gradually lift them a little higher, until their taste was more en­nobled, until their faculties were more evolved. And in doing that you would help them after death as well as before, for you would be draw­ing out the life of the higher emotions, of all that which makes them men. And then they should mingle with them more freely in sport as well as in learning. It is easy in the country; there the way is very open. It is harder m the town, but not too hard for loving hearts and good brains to work to make a way. And if they would share with the masses of the people - I am not thinking of money; I am thinking of comradeship and friendship and helpfulness and the sharing of refinement and of culture - if they would do that, all danger of revolution would pass away, for none would be willing to rise against those whose hearts were knit by love and service to the helping of the masses of the people.

It means a change of values, a change of ideals. It means the realisation that life is only precious as it is spent in service, and in making [97] happier the world in which we have been born. Money perishes in the using, but knowledge and love multiply as you give them away and share them with your fellow-men; if you have knowledge and give it, you are none the poorer; you yourself know the better, because you have tried to teach. And so all great intellectual and artistic pleasures and powers become the more fruitful the more they are given away. Give with both hands, and your hands will ever be full; for no hands can ever be emptied of those gifts which are poured out more abundantly the more freely they are scattered among men.

And today that is, in the sense of the world, to make a sacrifice. But what is sacrifice? In reality, it is not pain but joy. It is not really self-denial, but it is self-expression. You only think of sacrifice as pain, as I said, because you look at it from the standpoint of the body. Look at it from the standpoint of the eternal Spirit, and you will know that his joy and de­light is in pouring himself out, and that it would be in self-repression that suffering would be found.

You realise yourself as you give yourself. You realise your own divinity as you pour out your life on others. But sacrifice is not pain, it is delight. And just as the intellectual enjoyment of a splendid poem, or the emotional delight of some marvellous symphony, is a hundred times keener, more satisfying, and [98] more delicious than the food with which you support the body, so is the joy of the Spirit that pours himself out more delightful and more joyous than the joy of intellect and emotion. As those transcend the body, so does the joy of the Spirit in turn transcend them; and only when you have learned the joy of giving, when you have found your own life grow mightier because you have emptied yourself into the life of others, only then will you know that the uttermost service is the most perfect freedom, and that in giving one’s life to others one finds the life eternal which is the very Self in man. [99]

RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS: DOGMATISM, OR MYSTICISM?

FRIENDS: We have now come to the last of the present course of lectures, and just as on last Sunday I tried to draw up into two words the choice that lies before society with regard to the social difficulties, so tonight I have tried to sum up, again in two words, the problems which lie before the religious world imperatively demanding solution; upon the answer given to those problems seems to depend the future of Religion amongst us. It is not that with regard to the permanence of Religion any anxiety need be felt, for Religion - the search after God and the answer to the searching - that is everlasting as humanity, and it can never cease to be while man is living upon earth. But sometimes there comes over parts of the world at least that which has been truly called the eclipse of faith. Sometimes a cloud appears and veils for the moment the light of the great Sun of Truth; and although the sun be ever shining, no matter [100] how the clouds may gather over us, to us dwellers upon earth the sun can be shrouded by the clouds. Such times have been and may come again, and though Religion will not perish, much of human anguish, of human misery, may come between the man and the knowledge of the life he seeks. And it seems from many signs as though our world during the last few years had been facing such a crisis, that it had had presented to it a choice, a terrible choice. There was doubt enshrouding religious truth, questioning of the true meaning and scope of life; during these years of quickly growing science, of questionings on the part of religious people, during these years it seemed for a time - I am thinking of some thirty or forty years ago - as though the intellectual must needs pass into scepticism, as though the emotional would have no refuge save superstition. Unbelief on the one side, superstition on the other, menaced the Religion of man, and threatened it with at least temporary eclipse. And if today the horizon is brighter than before, if today we see tendencies in the religious world which promise a fuller faith, a deeper knowledge, yet we cannot hide from ourselves that that great problem for parts of Christendom has by no means yet been answered, although it may press for solution. Looking at the great Roman Catholic Church, the mightiest organisation of Christianity that Christendom knows or has known, we see that in that Church dogma, [101] almost in its crudest form, is being vehemently pressed upon the masses of its adherents. We have seen coming from the throne of the Pope declarations so hopelessly at variance with modern thought, so widely condemnatory of modern progress, that sometimes it almost seems as though the danger of Rome threatened to outweigh the value of its priceless discipline, of the Occultism widely spread throughout it. And even today that mighty Church is faced with the choice as to whether it will grant a wider liberty, or whether it will press upon the people fetters of dogma too heavy for the modern mind to bear.

Outside Rome the prospect is brighter, for gradually a deeper, more spiritual view is spreading through the Churches, is showing it­self not only in those that are called technically Churches, but also in the great Nonconformist communities. We see a more spiritual way of looking at Christian doctrine; we see a growth of mystic interpretation, a recognition that a spiritual truth cannot ever be confined within the limits of an intellectual statement. And I am told, although I do not know that by my own experience, that in the great Greek Church also there is a change of spirit, a revival of its ancient mysticism, a lifting up of hearts towards the heights to which only the Mystic can climb. So that all over Christendom, save with the one danger I have mentioned, it does seem as though it were true that the light is rising on [102] the horizon, and that there is a hope, well-nigh a certainty, that the deeper, more mystical view of Christianity will prevail above the more crudely dogmatic. And in order to clear our way, let me define what I mean by Dogma and Mysticism.

By dogma I mean a statement, elaborated by the reason, embodying a truth, or that which is believed to be a truth, and imposing it by authority from outside. I think, if you bring that definition and apply it to the dogmas that you find in the Churches, you will find that it is inclusive and accurate. The dogma is necessarily intellectual, not spiritual; is neces­sarily a statement elaborated by the reason embodying some truth, imposed by authority, whatever that authority may be. It may be the authority of an ancient Church or of some sacred Scripture, or of a man regarded as supreme; but in any case it is an authority outside the man from whom belief is demanded. And it comes to him with the claim of that authority for his submission; he must bow to it, accept it as the truth.

Mysticism, on the other hand, is the inner recognition of a spiritual truth, which the man accepts because he sees it to be true, knows it to be true by the testimony of the Divine within him. He does not seek an outer authority; he recognises only the authority of the Inner God. He does not demand that reason shall be able to argue to it; he sees it [103] in the light of the Spirit that transcends the reasoning of the mind; and the only authority to which he bows, the only authority on which he accepts the truth, is the authority of the God within him, whose eyes are opened so that he can see. He needs no outer argument, he needs no outer assent. Crowds may deny the truth he knows, but he feels his feet are founded upon a rock; the truth is within him enlighten­ing the reason; and though heaven and earth and hell were to proclaim the contrary, he would hold to the truth he knows, and cling to it despite every power that might strive to wrench it from his grasp.

We have then a clear distinction - an outer authority, an inner authority. The one presents the dogma, the other is the light by which the Mystic sees the truth. Those distinctions then will govern us in our thought tonight. And glancing at the past, the growth of religions, we can see that they pass through different stages. First, when the Teacher, the Founder of the faith, speaks and declares the truth, it is accepted then by many who hear Him, accepted from Him by a spiritual answer aroused by His spiritual power. Such a Teacher truly teaches with authority; but it is the authority of Spirit appealing to Spirit, and not as do the scribes and the doctors of the law. It is the recognition by the Spirit within of the Spirit in the Teacher, assenting without reasoning and without argument. And [104] wherever a mighty spiritual Teacher is made mani­fest on earth, and speaks with the power of the Spirit, there the awakened Spirits answer in glad acceptation of the teaching, not regarding it as an outer authority, because the inner assent approves that which the Teacher affirms. And so you find, when you read the teachings of the Lord Buddha, the teachings of the Lord Christ, that He speaks with such force and such illumination that the Spirit answers from within us and recognises the truth of the words.

And then, when He has passed away from earth, when the great spiritual truths that flowed from His lips are taken up by smaller men, by less spiritualised minds, then we come to the age of intellect, the age of dogma, where the truths are crystallised into a form of words, and those are presented to the world cut and dried - a system, rather than an inspiring life. Later on, when the age of faith has passed, during which the words were accepted as dogmas, then you come to a stirring of the intellect, the challenge of the mind. The mind has grown since the days when the dogmas were formulated, and the mind - stronger, wider, deeper - demands something more than that which the dogma presents and contains. In such a time we are standing now; such a breath has breathed over Christendom; and according to the way in which we solve our problem will be the immediate result on the great religion of the West. [105]

Suppose, then, that for a moment, seeing these stages through which we have passed and in which we stand; suppose before we go forward to a consideration of the mystical stage which follows on the dogmatic and the doubt­ing; suppose we glance for a moment at dogma, and try to estimate its place in religious teach­ing, in the religious life. It has a place, and that is in our own time sometimes too much forgotten. Dogma has a value; it is necessary at a certain stage of evolution of the human mind and thought. Just as in the statement of every science you find inevitably certain dogmas, which contain truths that have been ascertained, so in the facts of the religious life, in the great verities which cannot change, you inevitably have a period when they must be taught in the form of dogma, otherwise they cannot be grasped at all. The use of the dogma in religious knowledge is just the same as that of the statement of the expert in any science to the pupil who is learning that science at his hands. There are experts in religion as well as experts in science, and they have their place as teachers. The mischief of it only arises, as it might arise with the teacher of science, when, -after the pupil has learned, he is forbidden to investigate further, or to verify for himself by new experiment that which his teacher has declared. Dogma as a way of learning truth, as the early step on the ladder of knowledge - there dogma is in its right place. [106] But when from being a help it becomes a limi­tation; when from being a support it becomes a hindrance to further advance; when the teacher demands that the pupil shall never rise into the stage of knowledge but always remain in that of submission and belief, then religious progress is cramped, then religious growth is hindered, and the dogma that helped has to be shattered into pieces, because it has become an obstacle to further advance on the road to truth.

But that is so with science. The scientific man gives you his formula, tells you the experi­ments you are to make; but what would you think of him if he said to you: “You must never experiment for yourself in order to find out whether the formula I have given you is true or false”. There lies the danger, and it only arises when the teacher of dogma is beginning to feel in himself the doubt which he desires should not arise in the pupil’s mind. The Dogmatist tries to force dogma on others when he himself has doubt as to whether it is a full statement of the truth or not. And if you look into the mind even of the persecutor, you will find his persecution arises from doubt, and not from faith. He would fain silence, because he fears questions he cannot answer. He would forbid inquiry, because he fears lest it should show some aspect of the truth that he has overlooked. And often a doubt unrecog­nised, a doubt that he does not know as doubt, is gnawing at the root of his faith when he [107] forbids inquiry and shrinks from experiment. Hence the importance of realising the place of dogma, and to know it is a crutch to help us and not a barrier to prevent further advance. Then it will play its part in religious evolution, and will be useful and not dangerous to the growth of man.

But dogma must always be inadequate, for dogma compared to the Mystic’s knowledge is as the feeling of the hands compared to the sight of the eye. Dogma feels round a truth, expresses the part of it which it is able to gain by feeling, handles it, and tries to realise the form, tries to understand the shape. But just as the man who tests an object by feeling, and then opens his eyes to see it, grasps the difference between touch and sight, so is it with the Dog­matist and the Mystic. The dogma gives but one aspect of a truth; the Dogmatist can only see the truth from a particular view-point, and cannot express its full roundness, its perfection of depth and height. And so those who stay for the time in the dogma must ever remember that it is only one view of the many-sided truth; for spiritual truth can never be wholly grasped by the reason, and the things of the Spirit transcend the powers of the intellect.

But if we are to grow, if we are to reach the stature of the spiritual man, then we must transcend the dogma, and rise into the spiritual atmosphere and open the spiritual eye.

Let us now turn to a few of the great dogmas [108] of Christianity, and see how they gain - they do not lose - when they are seen by the eye of the Mystic, when they are contemplated in the light of the Spirit. For it is worth while to take a few of these, and show how different they are in dogma and in mysticism, albeit it is true that there is ever a reality under the dogma, and the Mystic sees the truth through the veil that oftentimes covers it. He gives you more, he does not really take away; he does not rob you of your priceless treasure, he only shows you new points of beauty that up to that point you had missed. It is as though you had a jewel in a casket and, looking upon it, were fasci­nated by the beauty of the one facet you see; but the Mystic takes the jewel and lifts it high into the sunlight so that all the facets send back the light, and it shines with a brilliance and a beauty and a splendour that it never had before. Oh, do not fear when we lift the jewel from the casket, as though the casket were necessary for the safety of the gem. In the sunlight it will gleam more splendidly than in the obscurity of the casket, and you will lose nothing, you will gain a thousand-fold, when you see your jewel in the sunlight and know it in the fulness of its beauty.

Let us see if that be not true. Let me take first of all, because it is the one rightly nearest to the heart, let me take the great question of the nature of the Christ, of His relation to the believer, of His place in the heart. [100]

Now, on the nature of the Christ there has been many a dogmatic statement. You find it more or less defined in the great Christian creeds written by Mystics, repeated by Dogmatists; they are taken as dogmas instead of as efforts to syllable out a truth too mighty for human words perfectly to explain. And yet in the grandeur of their language, in the stateliness of their expression, if you dwell upon them, brood over them, you will find depths of truth which may almost dazzle you sometimes by its splendour. For when you hear them repeated over and over again, when perchance you repeat them without any depth of thought behind them in your minds, you see only the dogma and not the truth behind it, and may even shrink from that you misunderstand because the light of the Spirit is wanting. You have there the Christ who is spoken of as Very God of Very God, the Only-Begotten of the Father. How does the Mystic see that truth? What to him is the Christ when thus dogmatically defined? He sees in Him the very image of Divinity, truly the very Son of God, in whom the Spirit is ever begotten of the Eternal Father, the Spirit that ever descends to become incarnate in matter, to suffer, to rise again triumphant, carrying with Him the manhood into God. He sees in that statement of the splendour of the Christ not an isolated figure, but humanity seen as one, humanity in all the splendour of its unity, humanity in all the Divinity of its [110] birthright, perfect God and perfect man, the human race the God-Begotten, to ascend to the God whence it is derived. He does not deny Christ - the Mystic never denies; he affirms Christ in the whole of humanity of whom the Christ is the symbol and the promise. Because in Him humanity rose up triumphant, therefore all men shall rise in Him, and know the reality of the Divinity embodied in the flesh.

Just as He is very God, so are His brethren who do not yet realise their own Divinity. And in the proclamation of that mighty manhood all humanity rises triumphant and knows itself as verily divine. “First-born among many brethren” - that is the name that was given to Him; but there would be no brotherhood were He divided from us by the vast gulf that, according to this view, separates God and man. Because God is in Him, He is also in us; because God became man in Him, He is also becoming man in us. And so we fall back on those great words of the Christ, when in His life on earth He was accused of blasphemy: “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods? If he called them Gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; say ye of Him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?” He is not less divine because His brethren are also divine. People say we drag Him downwards; nay, we lift humanity up to Him. It is not a [111] pulling down but a splendid rising, an ascension into heaven for the whole race of men.

And the Mystic sees in the life of Christ on earth not only the history of a perfect life, though that it is, but also the history of humanity. Born in weakness, raised in power; passing through all the stages of the great Initiations; born under the Star that shone above the manger; baptized into the divine life when the Spirit of God descends upon Him; trans­figured in the mountain when the realisation of Divinity is touched; agonising in the garden; crucified on the cross in the anguish which precedes the triumph of every Spirit knowing its own Divinity; and then in the triumphant rising, in the glorious ascension, the man become the divine Man, fully conscious of his own Divinity - the wondrous story of the Christ is repeated in the life of every man growing to Divinity; in the words of S. Paul the Christ is born in him, and in him grows to the full stature of the measure of the fulness of the Christ.

Sometimes one feels that the thing is so marvellous and so magnificent that we dare not think it true of ourselves with all our weaknesses, our faults, and our limitations. And yet, for what did He, that great Son of God, take on Him our humanity, save to show that man can rise to Deity? And nothing less than the accomplishment of His words will satisfy the yearnings within us; some day, some time, it [112] shall be true of you and of me: “Be ye there­fore perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect”.

Turn from that and take another dogma. Take this time the relation of the Christ to the human soul, embodied in the doctrine of the Atonement, with all the many phases through which, historically, that Christian doctrine has passed. I have no time to dwell upon them phase by phase, although they well deserve your careful study, your thought, for each stage has its lesson and its meaning. Take it in the broadest sense in which the Christ as Saviour approaches the human being, and, to use the phrases of an older generation, pays the debt of the man to God, and clothes the sinner in the garment of H is righteousness. Now, that doctrine was taught to many of you, men and women of about my own age, in a crude, sometimes called a legal, form. It is not so long ago, it is within our own lifetime, that we heard of a contract between God and man, of a substitution of the Christ for the sinner, of vicarious atonement, of imputed righteousness. And many of us can remember how we began to question, and how the revolt that arose with­in us against that form of the dogma was not merely the revolt of the intelligence; but also the revolt of the conscience and the heart. We felt to the depths of our being that we did not want an imputed righteousness. We wanted to be righteous ourselves, and not merely [113] accounted righteous before God. We felt that what we were offered was not that for which our souls were craving, that we cried out for bread and the Church gave us a stone. And yet there is something in that doctrine which has won the human heart, attracted the human affection, inspired men and women to the most splendid self-sacrifice, and by the strange paradox that you often find in Religion, despite the error of the presentation, the inner truth has fed the life of man. And what is the inner truth? That the Christ is able to help us, not by substitution of outer persons but by identity of nature; that He is able to share with us; that the Christ who saves is not a Christ out­side pacifying the wrath of an angry God, but a Christ within, who transmutes the nature into Divinity, and works out the life of Christ within the limits of the believer’s heart. We learn that when one rises so high in the spiritual life as the Christ has risen, that then, like the sun in heaven, He can pour down His light, His life, His love, into the vessels of human lives that are open to Him on earth; that just as barriers here separate one spot from another, as those divide the sunlight in your garden from the sunlight in mine, but to the sun there are no barriers, to the sun there are no walls of division, all the surface of the earth is his, as his light pours down upon it, life-giving - so do the light and the life of the Christ fall down from above our petty human limitations, knowing nothing [114] of division, but realising H is unity with ourselves; so does that life pour into us, and become our own as we appropriate it. And as the sunshine gives life to earth, so does that Sun of Life give life to our Spirits.

And then we realise that it is by sharing His nature with us that the Christ helps, us to rise to Him. By pouring His strength into our weakness, His wisdom into our ignorance, by that He lifts us towards Himself. And it is the glory of the Christ-nature, in whomsoever that nature may develop, that it ignores the differences and realises the unity, and that the lowest of sinners becomes illumined by the life of a Christ, and transformed into the divine image by the life and love that pour out from that triumphant Son of God. And therefore the apostles speak of being “in Him”, and speak of His helping and His saving. But not till you begin to live the life of the Christ can you know the glory of that salvation; for the human Spirit will never be satisfied until he realises his own Divinity and knows himself one with God.

And so with many another Christian dogma. You have difficulties over the dogma of the Trinity, what it means, the phrase that you meet, three Persons and one God. And yet, if you looked into your own nature, you would find the difficulty solved when it passed from the dogma to the fact of human experience; for look at your own consciousness, the image [115] of the divine, realise your own nature, which is part of the nature of God. You find in yourself the power to will, the power to know, the power to act. And your Trinity is the Father who is Will, the Son who is the Wisdom, the Spirit who is the creative Activity. And as ever in nature the Spirit embodies himself, so the three aspects become three persons; although but one divine consciousness showing out in triple way. And by understanding yourself you begin to understand the Godhead; you shake off the shackles of the arithmetical state­ment, and rise to the reality of the life that you see as the model on which your own is formed; and you know that where people see a difficulty there, it is because they have not yet sounded the depths of their own nature. For just as the water reflects the planet that shines down upon it, so does the consciousness in man reflect the mighty consciousness which is God. Thus gradually you come to realise that what you need is a spiritual vision, the open eye of the Spirit, that which is kin to Deity Himself.

But you may say: How shall the Spirit be unfolded; how shall we be able to become the Mystic; how shall we cast aside the fetters of dogma and rise into the liberty of the realised sonship? There is but the one way - the narrow, ancient path. Strait is that gate, narrow is that way; for you can only pass that gate when you have thrown aside all that the world counts of value, and you can only tread that [116] path in truth when the knowledge of God has become to you the one thing of worth in life.

Let us see how that path stretches itself out; let us see how we may approach the gateway that is so strait. What are the methods - the preparatory, and then the actual? The pre­paratory is the purification of the life, of the heart, of the whole nature. In an ancient Upanishat it is written of the man who would see the Self: “First, let him cease from evil ways”. Without that all else is useless; with­out that all else is futile; unchangeable the law, that only the pure in heart shall see. Arid as long as one evil way is followed, you cannot tread that path which leads to life. But not only must you cease from evil ways; you must also actively pursue the good. “Cease to do evil, learn to do well”, is in the Scripture familiar to all of you; the same thought that I have just quoted from the Upanishat, for after the evil ways are cast aside the active treading of the path begins. Purification, then the first step, strenuous, persevering, determined. And then what you all know, by name at least - meditation. There is no other way. For what is it that you are going to try to do? You are going to try to raise your consciousness into regions higher than that in which it dwells and works in your daily life; you are going to lift your individuality, your sense of “I”, above the mind with which you reason, above the mind with which you go out into all your business on [117] earth and your pleasures of life. That con­sciousness you know and call it “I”, but you have to rise beyond it, to transcend it, to know that it is not you. And how shall you reach that higher consciousness and realise it as yourself, while your minds are full of all the business and the pleasures of earth; in which the higher consciousness has no place and no concern? And so the next step is clear; you must learn to control the emotions; you must learn to control the mind. That whirl of emo­tion in which many of you live - you cannot live in that and in the calm spaces of the Eternal where the Spirit abides who is yourself Your mind that is full of change, that is full of passing moods, ever flying from one thing to another, taking up one thing and throwing aside another day by day, night by night - what has that in common with the serenity of the Spirit whose eye is fixed on God, who knows the real from the unreal, the eternal from the fleeting? Why, if you want to learn a science, you give some hours a day to it; and yet you would learn the science of the Spirit in the fragments of time that you can spare from your occupations and pleasures of earth! Not thus is the kingdom of heaven conquered, the kingdom of heaven that is within you. Surely that may claim as much attention as you would give if you were trying to conquer mathematics, if you were trying to become skilful in chemistry! And yet, for some mysterious reason you, who know [118] you must give time and thought to conquer things of earth, imagine the heavenly things can be had for the mere asking, the whim of a passing moment! Quiet emotions, mind that is still - those are the conditions of the dawning of the higher consciousness. Again it is written in the Upanishat: “In the tranquillity of the senses, in the quiet of the mind, he shall behold the glory of the Self”. That is the next task, to empty the mind, to empty the emotions; there, in that quiet and that silence, comes the dawning of a new light, the whisper of a hitherto unheard voice; the first notes of the Spirit steal gently over the quietude of the senses and the stillness of the mind; you hear, and scarce know you are hearing; you see, and scarce know whether it be sight or fancy that is beginning to gleam upon your mind. And slowly, quietly, steadily, day by day and week by week the music sounds more clearly, the vision becomes more radiant and more real, until in some great day of awakening, suddenly the mighty consciousness that is your Self shines out, and in its light all things are seen and known. Then no doubt is possible; no questions then can arise. As the glory of the crimson sun that leaps over the horizon and floods the earth with light, so is the glory of the spiritual sun when first it rises over the mind and heart of man.

And then you know what meditation means, and the reality of the path which has led you to that goal; and then meditation becomes a [119] means that you can use for further travel along the path. You may, if you will, take the path of knowledge, and by that great illumination you may know what you desire to know. Or you may take the path of devotion, and in the rapture of the Mystic’s love may rise to union with Deity Himself. If by the path of know­ledge you would climb, then illumination of the problems else obscure - that is your guerdon and your prize; you know truth at sight; you recognise truth from falsehood, without possi­bility of blunder, not by reasoning but by insight, not by argument but by intuition. As surely as the musician knows a discord from a harmony, so do you learn to know a falsehood from the truth; for your innermost Self is truth and not lie; your innermost Self is divine, is the truth on which the universe is built; and in the presence of that truth a lie is seen as a lie; you do not argue, you merely behold.

And if you tread the path of devotion, then you learn that the Godhead is not only truth but bliss; for, rising on the wings of love and service, you enter into the very being of that life which is Love eternal and infinite. The rapture of the Mystic is as real a thing as the insight of the Mystic; the one satisfies the intellect, the other fills the heart. Tread either path as your temperament bids you, for the end of all is the same. That which is Truth is no other than that which is Love. Truth and Love - these are both expressions of the divine life, [120] and perfect knowledge changes to perfect love, and perfect love irradiates as perfect knowledge. There are differences here, but the end of all is one. We separate knowledge and love; really, they are only two sides of a single life. And for each of you that vision is possible; for each of you that attainment is within reach; but on the old terms, the old conditions. The heart full of earth has no room for the birth of the Child Christ; the hands that cling to earth cannot be raised to heaven. And so, whatever your life may be, full of interest, of duty, of occupation - if you would be a Mystic your treasure must not be where your duty may bind your activities; for it is not the outer form, but the inner life which is necessary for the true Mystic. You may be highly placed or lowly, it matters not; you may be wealthy or poor; you may be King or peasant; but your heart must be fixed on the one truth: your life must be pure as the mountain air; and then, what­ever your circumstances, the Spirit who is you can rise above them, and you will find that in realising your own Divinity you realise as you never have done before your Brotherhood with everything that lives. [121]