Essays; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Great Britain
Yes! Dogmatic Christianity was dying before this war began. When it is
over, or as soon as men’s reason comes back to them, it will be dead. In
France, England, Germany, in Belgium, and the other small countries,
dead; and only kept wonderingly alive in Russia and some parts of
Austria through peasant simplicity. “Tell me, brother, what have the
Japanese done to us that we should kill them?” So said the Russian
peasant in the Japanese war. So they may say in this war. And at the end
go back and resume praise of the tribal God who fought for Holy Russia
against the tribal God who fought for valiant Austria and the mailed
fists of Germany.
This superstitional Christianity will not die in the open and be buried
with pomp and ceremony; it will merely be dead—a very different thing;
like the nerve in a tooth, that, to the outward eye, is just as it was.
That which will take its place has already been a long time preparing to
come forward. It will be too much in earnest to care for forms and
ceremonies. And one thing is certain—it will be far more Christian than
the so-called Christianity which has brought us to these present ends.
Its creed will be a noiseless and passionate conviction that man can be
saved, not by a far-away, despotic God who can be enlisted by each
combatant for the destruction of his foes, but by the Divine element in
man, the God within the human soul. That, in proportion as man is high,
so will the life of man be high, safe from shames like this, and devoid
of his old misery. The creed will be a fervent, almost secret
application of the saying: “Love thy neighbour as thyself!” It will be
ashamed of appeal to God to put right that which man has bungled; of
supplications to the deity to fight against the deity. It will have the
pride of the artist and the artizan. And it will have its own mysticism,
its own wonder, and reverence for the mystery of the all-embracing
Principle which has produced such a creature as this man, with such
marvellous potentiality for the making of fine things, and the living of
fine lives; such heroism, such savagery; such wisdom and such black
stupidity; such a queer insuperable instinct for going on and on and
ever on!
§ 3.
The Western world has had its lesson now—the lesson indelibly writ in
death: There is no longer room in civilization for despotic Governments.
In Germany, in Austria, in the country where despotism most reigns
supreme—our ally, Russia—they are doomed in theory, if not as yet in
fact.
The Slav is no more by nature the enemy of the Teuton than is the Briton
of the Frank. That enmity is a fostered thing of imperial and
bureaucratic dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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