Practicable Socialism, New SeriesBarnett, S. A. (Samuel Augustus)
Religion
Practicable Socialism, New Series
Barnett, S. A. (Samuel Augustus)
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class
3. When, however, we come to the third constituent, we have at once to
admit that the non-church-going population has no means of realizing the
Most High in a form which sustains and inspires its action. It has no
close or personal touch or communion with this goodness; no form which,
like a picture or like a common meal, by its associations of memory or
hope rouses its feelings; nothing which, holding the thought, stirs the
emotions and works the thought into daily life. The forms of religion,
the Churches, the doctrines, the ritual, the sacraments, which meant so
much to their fathers and to some of their neighbours, mean nothing to
them. They have lost touch with the forms of religious thought as they
have not lost touch with the forms of political thought.
Forms are the clothes of thought. Forms are lifeless, and thought is
living. Unless the forms are worn every day they cease to fit the
thought, as left-off clothes cease to fit the body. English citizens who
have gone on wearing the old forms of political thought can therefore go
on talking and acting as if the King ruled to-day as Queen Elizabeth
ruled 300 years ago, but these non-church-going folk, who for
generations have left off wearing the forms of religious thought, cannot
use the words about the Most High which the Churches and preachers use.
They have breathed an atmosphere charged by science--they are
rationalists, they have a vision of morality and goodness exceeding that
advocated by many of the Churches. They have themselves created great
societies, and their votes have made and unmade governments. When,
therefore, they regard the Churches, the doctrines of preachers, and all
the forms of religion, not as those to whom by use they are familiar or
by history illuminated, but as strangers, they see what seem to them
stiff services, irrational doctrine, disorganized and unbusinesslike
systems, and the self-assertion of priests and ministers. They, with
their yearnings to touch goodness, find nothing in these forms which
makes them say, “There, that is what I mean,” and go on stirred in their
hearts. They who have learnt to think turn away sadly or scornfully from
teaching such as that of the Salvation Army about blood and fire, where
emotion is without thought. Those who manage their own affairs resent
membership in religious organizations where all is managed for them.
They want a name for the Most High of whom they think as above and
around themselves, but somehow the doctrines about Christ, whom they
respect for His work 2000 years ago, do not stir them up as if He were a
present power. The working classes, says Dr. Fairbairn in his “Religion
in History and Modern Life,” are alienated because “the Church has lost
adaptation to the environment in which it lives”.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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