BY R HEBER NEWTON D.D.
A more appropriate phrasing of my topic would, to most minds, be "The irreligious aspect of Socialism." The ordinary notion of Socialism is that of a revolt of fools, and madmen against the order of society, a conspiracy against the sacred rights of property. If religion be the recognition of the bonds of a divine order and the obedience thereto, then to those who identify our existing human system with that divine order there would seem to be little of religion in the chaos which apparently opens before us in Socialism.
Socialism presents itself to many minds as the direct outgrowth of a decay of religion. Dr. Draper, in an article on "The political effect of the decline of faith," places it among the sequelae of unbelief: "What is it that has given birth to the Nihilist, the Communist, the Socialist ? It is the total extinction of religious belief. "With no spiritual prop to support them, no expectation of an hereafter, in which the inequality of this life may be adjusted, angry at the cunningly devised net from which they have escaped, they have abandoned all hope of spiritual intervention in their behalf, and have undertaken to right their wrongs themselves." In that remarkable book, "Underground Russia," Stepniak inclines to the same conclusion: "Absolute atheism is the sole inheritance that has been preserved intact by the new generation, and I need scarcely point out how much advantage the modern revolutionary movement has derived from it." There can be no question that, as socialistic ideas spread, working-men experience an alienation from the recognised forms of religion. Senator Blair, chairman of the Senate Committee on Labour and Education; told me that it was the almost uniform testimony of such representatives of the labor movement as came before his committee that the workingmen of this country were becoming increasingly estranged from the churches.
This, I believe, is the conclusion of most of those who have studied the problem of the attitude of labour toward religion, in our country or in other lands. There is even apparent on the part of socialistically inclined workingmen, a positive antipathy toward every traditional form of religion. The more outspoken representatives of the movement violently, and even blasphemously, repudiate all religious faith. One of the most radical of the socialistic papers of our country, in an article upon the "Fruits of the belief in God," exclaims: " Religion, authority and State are all carved out of the same piece of wood. To the devil with them all." The extreme wing of Socialism—that represented by Bakounine—gives utterance to similar delightful sentiments : "The old world must be destroyed. . . . The beginning of all those lies which have ground down this poor world in slavery is God."
It is not necessary for me to argue before this Association that such language does not prove any real anti-religiousness, or even any real irreligiousness ; that it may simply signify a needlessly violent reaction from the false forms of religion, a shockingly coarse protest against the corruption and perversion of the faiths which it would sweep off the earth. There is oftentimes manifested in such language a feeling as of suppressed bitterness towards a supposed friend that has proved faithless—as when a certain Socialist declared, " We are not atheists, we have simply done with God." The miseries and wrongs of the existing order appear to those who suffer from them, to deny the reality of a divine providence ; and the fading out from so many minds of the belief in immortality seems to rob them of the one hope, of reward for the toils and privations of the life on earth. When Paradise looks to such sufferers like the hope of a future held forth to keep them patient under their present hopelessness, it is not wonderful that such a paper as the San Francisco Truth should cry out, "Heaven is a dream invented by robbers to distract the attention of the victims of their brigandage."—The very violence of denunciations of religion may, then, simply prove the depth of feeling which has been outraged, the intensity of the loss which appears to have been sustained.
He who rightly gauges the depth of the religious nature in man will not believe it possible that any class of men be experiencing an exhaustion of this sacred life. What seems to be such an exhaustion must to him appear simply as the winter that follows summer and autumn, only to make ready for another spring. This very movement which appears to have divorced itself so completely from religion, and to have arrayed itself so inimically toward that ancient spirit, is already manifesting the action of forces which are not distinguishable from the forces of the religious sentiment. Among the ignorant, this feeling takes some curious expressions. German workingmen, who had ceased to go to church, developed a generation ago a cultus of Lassalle; and a belief was for a while quite widespread that their great champion, who had lost his life in a duel had died for them, and that he was to return again to save them; among the more intelligent classes of labor, the old religious sentiment seems to be renewing its action in the passion of enthusiasm which inspires them as with the ardour of a new hope and a new faith.
The earlier forms of modern Socialism were very strikingly characterized by a religious spirit. There was a glow and fire of enthusiasm, a sweep and reach of imagination, a pure and lofty passion, of idealism, in which none could fail to recognise the essential spirit of religion. Saint Simon saw in his teaching the long-waited-for realisation of essential Christianity. His doctrines were to constitute " the new Christianity." One who visited the communistic organization of Paris, in 1850 would have found in many of their halls a picture of a sacred form labelled " Jesus Christ, the first representative of the people." The little communistic societies which dot our own shores were mostly founded in a spirit of simple and devout piety. Whatever success has attended any of them with one or two exceptions, has been due to the force of the religious inspiration working in them. The members of Brook Farm felt, as one of the community wrote, "a more exquisite pleasure in effort from the consciousness that we are laboring, not for personal ends, but for a holy principle."
Even that Jacobin of Socialism, Proudhon, closed his memoire on property with this noble invocation, " O God of liberty! God of equality! Thou God, who has placed in my heart the sentiment of justice before my reason comprehended it, hear my ardent prayer! Thou hast formed my thought, Thou has directed my studies, Thou has separated my spirit from curiosity, and my heart from attachment in order that I should publish the truth before the master and the slave. I have spoken as Thou hast given me the power and talent: it remains for Thee to complete Thy works. Thou knowest whether I may have sought my interest or glory. O God of liberty ! may my memory perish, if humanity may but be free; if I may but see in my obscurity the people firmly instructed, if noble instructors but enlighten it, if disinterested hearts but guide it! . . . . Then the great and small, the rich and the poor, will unite in one ineffable fraternity; and altogether, chanting, a new hymn, will re-erect thy altar, O God of liberty and equality!"
The latter forms of Socialism, whose origin is found in Germany, however lacking they may be in the conventional expressions of religion, are not without marks which betray the workings of the old force. The German is naturally religious; and, when that religiousness turns aside from ecclesiasticism, it does but breathe out secularism with a spirit not to be distinguished from religion. That spirit pours itself into art and philosophy, and gives us, in Beethoven or in Hegel, music and metaphysic which are intensely religious. It pours itself into social science, and gives us Socialism which, without knowing it, is fervently religious. Lassalle had all the fiery enthusiasm of a new crusader. He closed his famous lecture upon "The Workingman's Programme" with such a passage as this: "You are the rock on which the Church of the present is to be built. It is the lofty moral earnestness of this thought which must, with devouring exclusiveness, possess your spirits, fill your minds, and shape your whole lives, so as to make them worthy of it, comfortable to it, and always related to it." Even amid the horrors of Nihilism, which is at once a political revolt and a social revolution, there is a lurid light as of the kindling of those mystic forces which have so often; burned, like the fire upon Abraham's altar, in clouds of smoke, shaping dreadful visions.
In such self-abnegating enthusiasm there breathes the essential spirit of religion, however unconscious it may be of its own nature. That this enthusiasm may pass very rapidly into the consciousness of its own religiousness we may see strikingly illustrated in the work of Mr. Henry George. "Progress and Poverty" fairly glows throughout with the passionate conviction which the author thus expresses towards the close of book: "It will be read by some who in their heart of hearts have taken the cross of a new crusade." This passion of justice has resolved itself in the author's soul into "the newly kindled fires of religion. The book is a cry of the soul as much as an argument of the mind. That singular conclusion to a work on political economy, the chapter on Immortality, is a fitting end to a book which breathes through out the aspiration of a noble nature after social righteousness. Those who know Mr. George personally, know the deep and genuine religiousness of the man, and are aided in interpreting the social movement, which he has so mightily quickened, from his personal experience, as he passes out from the traditional forms of the religious life, thinking that he has lost religion itself, only to find it once more awaiting him at the conclusion of his studies, of social science, in the enthusiasm of humanity enkindled in his soul as the very love of God.
What, then, are the elements in Socialism gendering this passionate aspiration, which takes on the tones as of a new inspiration? We must needs define Socialism. Socialism is not to be identified with any special form which it assumes. Its essential idea is larger than any specific theory of a particular writer or than any platform of a local movement. It is more than the Phalansterianism of Fourier, the People's Banks of Proudhon, the Political Organization of Labour of Lassalle, the elaborate system of Political Economy shaped by Karl Marx, the Anarchism of Elisee Reclus or Bakounine, the Communal Proprietorship of the land which is exercised by the Mir, the Land Nationalization of Henry George, or the State Ownership of the Means of Production of the German School. Each of these systems and theories and institutions forms a variety of the species Socialism, which in turn is a division of the genus political economy —a very black and altogether heterodox member of the family, but still a legitimate scion of the stock.
What is there, then, that, is found in these various forms of Socialism which is common to them all, which is therefore to be considered its essential idea ? Speaking generally, it may be said that Socialism is the "ism," of a more social society, the "ism" which seeks an industrial order that shall be a real commonwealth, and which seeks that order rather through social action than through individual action; which finds the radical evil of our present system in its excessive development of individualism, and which proposes to correct that evil by the alternative of a larger mutualism; which would, balance the unregulated action of free competition by some co-ordinating power, either from great industrial and trade associations or through such agencies from the State; which would ensphere private property within a vast body of common property, whether vested in huge co-operative societies or in the State itself; which would guard against the evils of our present system by holding the raw material of wealth, land, and the means of production of wealth, machinery, as the common property of the labour which is to create that wealth. Socialism is not anarchism nor yet is it communism. It does not propose simply to overturn the existing order and let civilisation lapse back into chaos. It does not dream of unwinding the mainspring of society, individualism, and of abolishing private property. It believes, whether rightly or wrongly, that it is endeavouring to carry on the social organization higher, to hasten sorely the needed developments of the historic progress of industry, to lead up our most imperfect system into more perfect forms, to master the anarchic disorders of the industrial world and to bring thereout a real order, to push forward the political revolution of the eighteenth century into the economic revolution of the 19th century, to crown the Government of the people by the people and for the people in an ownership of the people by the people and for the people! The leaders of Socialism do not expect to find a speedy realisation of these aims, though the rank and file of their followers may doubtless lose the time-perspective and look in the foreground for the scenes that really lie in the shadowy background of their alluring vision. Rodbertus allowed 500 years for the realization of his ideas. Lassalle distinctly warned his followers against the illusion that the social revolution could be precipitated immaturely upon civilization. A sane Socialism expects to realize its dream only through the slow evolution of society. The co-operative State is to be the flower of the process of integration that is now going on in society; the Government's necessitated co-ordination of the associative action which is developed voluntarily among the people on an increasingly large scale ; the ultimate generalization from co-operative trade and industrial organizations ; the body of public property, growing around the public spirit fostered in the reign of "the Commons;" the republic which is to be a commonwealth governing itself.
In such a dream, whether it be an illusion or a true prophetic vision, we can readily enough discern the forces which are leading this new and some what strange manifestation of the old religious spirit.
(To be continued.)
Kapunda Herald (SA ), 1887, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107362083http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107362303
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